So, anyway, Jim says a lot on his site, but you have to go looking for it. I figured I'd put it all in one place for you guys. I'll put everything I think is important here, though probably not all at once.

No wards on the office. You need a threshold for anything but teensy defenses, and the office is a public place of business, not a home.

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Actually, Harry first uses a veil in "The Warrior."

And there's a big difference between magic done by sitting down in a lotus position, concentrating for ten minutes, maybe using props and/or circles to augment the process, and magic that you know well enough to do nownownow. It's the difference between shooting arrows at a target in your back yard, talking to friends, and shooting arrows at a running target through the cover of the forest. Theory and application are in different worlds.

Harry's always been able to do a perfect veil. He just had to be sitting in a circle, set up specifically for the purpose, sitting down, and he couldn't be doing anything else while he did that. Which makes it minimally useful.

By the time he was teaching Molly, Harry had been forced to sit down and practice his veils, working them into his regular routine. His veils suck, compared to Molly's--but he can toss up a veil that's not even as good as Predator camo, and at least retain enough awareness to walk or run around, and maybe pull off a couple of little tricks while he does it. But it's not something he was born good at. He's had to work for it.

Besides. He keeps making Molly practice things she isn't good at--like shields and kinetic strikes--because, he says, it's good for her (and it is). But if he sits around not practicing things /he/ isn't good at, how does that look to the grasshopper?

Though a Council loyalist would probably phrase it, "So it does what it can, where it can, to protect mankind."

And yes. The Council in part relies on having a damned good bluff. I mean, can you ever really be /certain/ that a wizard doesn't have what he needs to get to you? They do, after all, make a point of, every so often, demonstrating that they can still take the kid gloves off.

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Which cop is scarier:

The one who can kick down your door, speed-draw and shoot you?

Or the one who can look at you and know when you're lying?

Physical power is only of unlimited utility where exercise of that power is unlimited. When any limits come into play, a given conflict gains an additional, mental context, where simple physical power can be partially or completely negated.

I believe Brust has phrased the corollary to that more succinctly than I could. But my point is that cops don't get by on direct power alone, and neither do Wardens. Luccio, as she is now, operating at severely reduced magical capacity, is an excellent example of that.

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Susan did not take into account Michael.

Is there some reason she should? Susan has spent what? An /hour/ around Michael? Maybe two? And she's been scorched by one of the Swords, which would appear to clearly indicate that Michael might not be kindly disposed toward her.

At which point did she have an experience that would make her think "this is one of the most important decisions of my life. I should entrust it to THAT guy."

Not everyone in the books knows everything that the reader knows. In fact, /no one/ in the books knows everything that the reader knows (since people have clearly been able to infer things about Harry's character from his actions and thoughts which are huge blind spots to him, personally).

They kinda /do/ win. It's one reason the White Council thinks of itself as something so ohmygodmighty important. But bear in mind a few things:

1) The White Council /exists/ in order to limit the power of wizards. These days, it's mostly about keeping wizards out of the black magic--but in the past, it was also to keep wizards out of politics. They would show up as advisers, rarely (most "court wizards" were charlatans or underpowered schmucks), but the Council itself was very much against getting involved in things.

That's mainly because if the Council threw its weight in anywhere, it was all but guaranteeing a civil war among its own members. (Remember, it's very Euro-centric.)

The original Merlin learned a lesson about wizards involving themselves in politics. They already have too much power to use wisely, from his point of view.

2) Wizards were a hell of a lot more rare in centuries past. Their numbers have increased along with the world population, but back then a given country was lucky if it had produced a single wizard-level talent more than about one generation in three.

3) Travel in general was a lot harder. Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you. Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don't have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease. They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks. For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you've got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections. And that's it. In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you're going to die of pneumonia in the future. (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you've got cancer or other serious medical issues.) Wizards don't face that same danger. If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn't of any more consequence than getting over a cold.

But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was. And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME. Which most of them did. That kinda limited how much conflict they would actually get involved in.

4) The Inquisition. Fact of the matter is that the Inquisition, for better or worse, made everyone REALLY aware of practitioners. If a wizard started slinging his power around willy nilly, it would attract attention. Probably /hostile/ attention, at that. Which leads us to...

5) Wizards have to sleep. Yes, an enraged wizard could probably kill just about anyone he wanted to, flatten towns, all the mighty wizard stuff. But... there are about a million humans to every full-blown wizard talent. A strong wizard can kill a mortal with about as much effort as it would take you to pick up a piece of gravel and toss it twenty feet. Now, go out to a gravel pile and do that a MILLION times.

You aren't going to finish that project today.

The appearance of overwhelming power is one of the only things guaranteed to make human beings unify out of sheer fear for their survival. (Example: see Haiti. Overwhelming power of nature drew a response of overwhelming relief efforts from fellow human beings. Now, imagine that someone told those people that the earthquake was someone's fault. Someone real, and dangerous, but someone who you could punch in the nose. Think about that.)

Wizards were certainly a force of nature. One that would frighten people enough to go after them with overwhelming numbers and a vengeance.

Of course, that leaves many, many other things they could do to influence events. The most powerful such was the gathering of information and rapid communications. Their ability to travel rapidly, to gather information and send it elsewhere was something that didn't really get beat until a Mr. Ford, Mr. Marconi, and some guys named Orville and Wilbur came along. And they were basically in the information business, which is an excellent way to guarantee security.

They were also largely responsible for the Renaissance, in the Dresden universe. Not directly, but by going out and finding the best and brightest minds and seeing to it that they got the education and the chances they needed to succeed in life. Some wizards even did direct mentoring of various brilliant figures of European history (DaVinci and Gallileo were two prime examples).

But they stayed out of direct involvement in wars and politics, instead focusing on becoming involved in the intellectual progress of society. Wizards from France and Germany, for example, would treat each other much the same way as opposing lawyers in a big case. Even when their clients were tearing each other to bits, that didn't meant that the two wizards were foes. They were, in fact, professional colleagues, who were likely to go off and get a beer and roll their eyes at their clients' foolishness.

(All of this is mostly focused on the White Council, which was centered in Europe. Wizards in other areas of the world, such as the Americas, eastern Asia, and Australia have far different histories.)

But that factor--the sheer weight of numbers of mortals--dictated the role they had to assume to survive and prosper. They hoped that a more advanced, less warlike culture would provide a better place for wizards to live. In fact, it did. But it also robbed them of the extreme power they'd possessed until that time, relative to vanilla mortals.

6) PEOPLE BELIEVED IN MAGIC AND IT SCARED THEM. I mean, there was none of this "but there's no such thing as magic" nonsense involved. And not all the witch hunters were in it for the money. There was a class of men who knew all about the various forces of the supernatural, out there in the darkness, and who made themselves as able to contend with them as any mortal could be. If a wizard went all kaboomy on mortals, he knew that there was someone who was going to hunt him, striking in a moment of vulnerability.

(I'll leave it to you to deduce who they grew up into, eventually. It isn't complicated or hard to see.)

End of the day, even wizards bleed. And as the wise Governor of California says, if it bleeds, you can kill it.

But they sure as hell enjoyed their centuries on top of the food chain.

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We've had three short stories from non-Harry viewpoints:

Backup--Thomas

Even Hand--Marcone (That one is forthcoming in the Dark and Stormy Knights anthology. Marcone scares me a lot more now.)

Aftermath--Murphy (That one will be exclusive to SIDE JOBS, is set forty five minutes after the end of CHANGES, and is turning into a novella on me, rather than a short story.)

I will probably continue to do short pieces from the viewpoints of alternate characters as we proceed. They aren't my favorite kind of writing, but it's fun (for ME, I mean) to see how different the Dresden Files world looks through the various sets of eyes.

If I ever do any major work (IE, novels) from alternate characters, I probably could not set them in the time period of the Dresden Files. I have several neat ideas, and the one that appeals to me the most is writing the French and Indian war years from the viewpoint of a young Ebenezar McCoy and his associates. The first duel between Eb and Listens-to-Wind is pretty epic in my head.

Alternatively, I might write up some Civil War/Western stories from the Dresden universe. I mean, there's a /reason/ all those sheriff's badges are five pointed stars within a circle.

If I was going to do anything in the modern era, it would have to be set after the Dresden Files climax, and I would probably focus on characters in the non-powerful-nation parts of the story: Guys like Vince, the Venatori, and the Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. (Do NOT screw with the Librarians. Holy moly. Just don't.)

But, at the end of the day, I'm not sure what I'll be doing next just yet. There's plenty of time to decide.

The skinwalker on the show wasn't even a freaking skinwalker. It was a doppleganger with a human-skin-leather fetish, at best. It wasn't a bad villain, don't get me wrong. But it was just a general-issue skinning/doppleganging demon thing, because they needed to create a scary monster without spending any extra money on the effects they'd need to do it--whereas I'm doing my best to base my stuff on actual folklore.

The naagloshii went in because the actual skinwalker folklore is pretty freaking terrifying and rich material for a story. But it has nothing to do with the show. And with the exception of the base idea of the comic book, which came from a version of the pilot episode that was never shown, NOTHING I WRITE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE SHOW. I AM NOT TAKING THE SHOW INTO CONSIDERATION FOR THE BOOKS, EVEN A LITTLE.

I mean jeez. Those guys didn't even send me a comp copy of the DVD. And when a friend gave me a copy of the DVD set, I popped it onto a shelf and there it has stayed, unopened.

Fanwanking is as inevitable as spilled beer at a ball game, I know, but I wanted to go on record with my side.

Four times. Defeated Demonreach's attack with water, and after that punched back with fire.

Quote5. Gave him a name, and honored him again

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Gave him a name and /blood/.

QuoteDemonreach may not be friendly to humans but he is not violent to others. All the animals on the Island are welcome and make their homes there. While he may have a dark nature, nothing on the Island is corrupt or foul.

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Two of these three sentences are precisely, absolutely correct. One of them is lethally half-right.

Essentially abdication. The previous mother wearies of her duty and moves along. There's been one new Mother Summer during recorded human history. Mother Winter has never retired.

Quote2. the white council - isn't mab her true name?

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It's /one/ of her Names. But God help the simp (or Council of simps) who tries to control her with that and nothing else. Ugh, that would get ugly.

Quote4. if the elders of the black court could have taken mab, then HOW ON EARTH did any mere force of humans manage to go up and stake them? i mean, they should've wiped out anything that was coming after them if they can take on MAB herself...just a thought

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Power in the spirit world isn't the same thing as power in the material world. And a one-on-thirtyish fight (Mab vs the elders of the BC) is WAY different than a one-on-20,000 fight (a BC vampire against a modest mortal city). Especially when the 20,000 know what your weaknesses are, and how to kill you with them. And that's assuming that you don't have a saint, or an independent wizard, or a shaman, a Knight of the Cross or some other champion, or other spiritual allies on your side which was not uncommon. Hell, for that matter, you might well be aided by vampires from the other Courts. *Everyone* resented how powerful the Blacks had become.

Quote(and shouldn't the black court be the most numerous? in blood rites, ebenezer mentioned after a few weeks, there would be dozens or even hundreds of vamps, so y don't the black court vamps just settle down in africa or india and start biting away?)

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Nukes.

You get all /that/ assertive, and you risk stirring mortals into awareness. And we monkeys are /dangerous/ in large groups, especially with all our ferromancy (technology).

There's also a psychological issue on behalf of the vampires. Bear in mind that evolution made a pretty brutal selection among the Black Court. The ones who survived and prospered were those who avoided notice, respected the potential danger mortals represented, and who were generally quick to leave town rather than charge into a confrontation.

In any personal-scale conflict, a mature BC vamp is gonna tear holes through any mortal or White Court vampire. But the mortals started cheating, and doing all their fighting in angry mobs, and creating weapons that were ridiculously overpowered for the job of killing one another which could actually inconvenience, wound, or even kill a BC vamp. Murphy did all right in that BC nest, because she had allies, appropriate weapons and (most importantly) knowledge and a plan.

Quote5. cowl with darkhallow - really? just a bunch of spirits...

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If he'd succeeded, he'd have had the collective power of all of those supernatural beings and then some. He'd have been clearly stronger than the Ladies, and a full-on equal to Mab. I mean, why do you think the Erlking was summoned as part of that ritual? Because that's how the big E got so boss in the first place.

For that matter, how do you think the Mothers and Queens and Ladies established their original base of power? That big old sacrificial, power-sucking stone table in Tir na noth isn't there for its primitive decorative aesthetic.

Quote6. ferrovax - is this because he's the OLDEST dragon? (i thought it was an empty boast) or because he's a dragon?

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Ferrovax feels absolutely no need to boast. It's because he /is/ a Dragon, large D, an elemental force of the cosmos. He isn't some kind of Smaug hanging around a nice apartment. He's a Dragon in a more Asian sense of the concept, a semi-divine being who was once given authority over various portions of the mortal universe, and who was responsible for their orderly procession. There /are/ Smauglike dragons (though not nearly as many now as there have been in the past, thanks George!) but they are essentially nothing but emissaries and servitors created in the image of the real thing.

Regardless of big D or little d, dragons almost universally resent humanity for usurping the balance of power in the world.

Quotey doesn't cowl do the darkhallow thing on a remote island or in the middle of the sahara desert or something...same with hag. just a question that's been bothering me...

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Cause you need people around to fuel the fire. Had Cowl been successful, his ascension would have exterminated every source of life for several miles--and the more who died, the more elevated he would have become. Think of them as a big old batch of human sacrifices.

The hag's ritual was a far more primitive version of Kemmler's rite, and wouldn't have done nearly as much for her as the Darkhallow would have for Cowl--but it still would have sparked off massive violence, plague, ill-fortune and general chaos for miles all around.

Mab "hired" Harry, didn't she? Okay, it wasn't as simple as paying in cash, but nonetheless a transaction took place, or rather, is in the process of taking place. And Harry isn't just some schmuck whose services are available to the highest bidder. That said, when Mab whistled, he came running. It's not about money, but about a complex transfer of obligations, created over Harry's entire lifetime, and to some degree over the lifetime of his mother.

Even in the real world, obligation is something that you run into more and more as you get older. And something as old as the naagloshii has had a LONG time to acquire markers and to put a few of its own into circulation.

Of course there's also the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there are some things in the world who see something like the naagloshii as cheap muscle. And they finally noticed the annoying twit in Chicago.

If I remember the script properly, Hrothbert died while he and his true love, who was also a Council-class wizard, were fleeing an angry mob. She took a poisoned crossbow bolt in the back and died in his arms. He just sat there holding her body, stunned and in despair, and someone buried an axe in his skull.

The skull prop on the show had an actual hole in the back that had been made with an axe, too. Not sure you ever saw that on the screen, but I got to pick it up and play with it, and make the continuity/prop manager wig out when I put it back half an inch away from where it had been previously.

Yeah, Morgan was not about to win any popularity contests, inside the Council or out of it--but *everyone* knew that he was bad news. He wasn't *liked* by hardly anyone, but he was *respected* by most of the Council and their allies, and *feared* by most of their enemies.

Harry just happened to be in that latter category for the longest time, as far as Morgan was concerned. Morgan scared the bejeezus out of Harry, on several levels. Which was why Harry's POV toward Morgan was so freaking skewed. Harry /always/ saw him as the Javertesque-persecutor of warlocks and wayward wizards. For everyone else, that was only a part of Morgan's identity. Mainly, to them, he was the guy from the White Council who was most likely to kick down your door, burn your wicked minions to ash in fire and brimstone, and then divide you into several distinct nonentities with his sword. The killing-baby-warlocks thing was just his sideline.

Harry does not have Morgan's experience or expertise in a fight. It doesn't mean that Harry isn't also an effective and dangerous opponent, but he has a completely different approach--and he generally has a lot more to learn, still, before he is as formidable as someone like Morgan.

And as all the world knows, all Native Americans eat at the same restaurants and know each other and stuff?

Guys, LtW is from a Great Lakes nation. Naagloshii are native to the Navajo and other tribes of the Southwest. There are a couple of thousand miles, some truly epic geography, and an infinite number of cultural, religious, and lingual differences between the two.

I mean, that would be like suspecting Luccio of summoning up a killer svartalf, based upon the fact that she's from Italy and svartalves are Scandanavian, and both Italy and Scandanavia are in Europe.

In point of fact... I'm pretty sure Italy is *closer* to Scandanavia than northern Illinois is to Arizona.

Hmmm. In terms of pure, raw power, several who have appeared or been mentioned in the books could pull it off, though neither side would really "win" as much as "continue to exist." Plus, the sudden absence of Mab would do freaking HIDEOUS things to the earth. But here's who has the necessary horsepower do it:

o Titania--though it would be a coin toss. Almost literally.o The Mothers (who wouldn't)o The White Council. As in, ALL the White Council. Every wizard on the planet. And they'd need her Name.o Drakul.o Ferrovax.o The Red Court--again, ALL the Red Court, though their odds wouldn't be good.o The entire White Court--very, very long odds on that, but if they actually pulled it off, whoever took Mab would effectively control her power.o Cowl (if the Darkhallow had succeeded).o A union of the old Elders of the Black Court. They were freaking scary until the Whites arranged to have them hounded down by mortals.

All of that, of course, assumes that Mab is standing there alone, outside of Faerie, and not commanding an entire nation, literally millions and millions and millions of nightmarish creatures of every description. Which she does.

There's a REASON that when Mab said, "Sign these Accords and abide by them," people listened.

No one who can take her outright in a straight fight would be willing to try it. The best they could hope for is that the outcome for them would be slightly less hideous than it would be for Mab.

Think of it... oh, in terms of nuclear-capable nations. If someone has nukes, you don't start sending guys in tanks over their borders. Sure, Russia probably COULD take India in a straight fight, but they WON'T. India's got nukes. That radically changes the decision tree.

You don't fight nuclear nations head on. You defend yourself against them, sure, but if you want to go on the offensive, you have to do it through very unconventional means (say, flying planes into buildings) or you hit them economically or diplomatically, or interfere with their interests in lower-stakes arenas (the way we did with Russia in Afghanistan in the 80s).

You can beat a nuclear nation, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't get done through simple, direct force of arms.

Michael went ten seconds against one guy who /didn't/ know how to fight with a sword after that guy had run down multiple flights of stairs and sprinted across several city blocks. That is a far cry from going up against a vampire or a Denarian /without one of the Swords/. I mean, he needs a cane to walk because he /needs/ it.

You blow out a knee bad enough and you don't play in the NFL no more. Maybe you can play touch football at the park with friends, but that's a long way from getting another superbowl ring.

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To clarify.

1) Thomas is barely anything at all under six feet high, when he isn't wearing shoes.

2) He has "natural" blue eyes when he isn't hungry. They get paler and paler, based on how much he needs/wants to feed.

3) Harry, being freakishly tall, mostly drops people into "much shorter than me" or "a little shorter than me" categories.

Then again, "crazy" is generally considered to be a lack of connection with reality--and a lot of characters in the Dresden Files can MAKE reality. They might have a seriously skewed idea of the way reality should be, but if they can make it happen then they aren't crazy, per se.

Nah, they wouldn't even come close. I mean... it's like comparing apples and... and hand grenades.

Just about the best they could hope to accomplish would be to force Mab to make an effort. Though when Mab came for them, it wouldn't be a kick-down-the-door-and-kick-ass kind of encounter. It would be a One-two-three-four-five-Hey-weren't-there-SIX-of-us-here-a-second-ago? situation.

I mean, sure, the Erlking is a peer of Mab's--but there's kind of a reason that it's /Mab/ who rules the Worst of the Worst in Faerie, and not the Erlking.

All of which doesn't even TOUCH on the way power is actually balanced in Faerie, because neither Mab nor the Erlking would attempt such a thing, or /consider/ attempting such a thing. It would upset the natural order. Conflicts between most of the Fae powers are very subtle, and generally involve proxies, pride, sex or all of the above.

Harry (or Molly or Murphy or Butters or any other mortal) has more potential to harm Mab than that crew. Not much more likelihood of victory, true, but it isn't /zero/, either.

In mainstream Western academic mythology, which was mostly established at a time when everyone automatically assumed that the Native Americans couldn't possibly have had anything original in their mythos, (and when Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show was drawing big crowds by claiming to present the "true" West) yes, a skinwalker is the same thing as a European gothic-witch/werewolf.

I'd advise anyone to at least read something that was written by someone who /talked/ to a Native American at some point, though. Preferably one of the Dine', though it is not a matter of open discussion among the tribes, even today.

They aren't the same. They share some similar capabilities, but they are not at /all/ the same.

Oh, and Mab's not using a mouthpiece because she's incapable of speech. She could talk all she wanted--as long as she didn't mind killing the people she was trying to communicate with. Suffice to say that the whole "words can never hurt me" thing just doesn't apply to angry Faerie Queens.

Butters said nicked, not perforated. He's mostly concerned that it'll split and burst at the weakened spot if Morgan goes gallivanting around on it, and that if the rest of the bleeding doesn't get shut down, the combined trauma of lots of injuries could send him into shock. If he'd had true arterial bleeding, Morgan wouldn't have made it to Chicago in the first place.

And the worst thing that could have happened is sort of subjective. I'd say that under the circumstances, the worst thing would have been if the artery had been severed completely and the severed ends retracted up into the muscle where you'd have to go digging with forceps to get them back out again before you could fix them. Or at least, the most frickin' grisly thing. Yuck.

It doesn't, or at least, not one that lasts very long. Once your opponent realizes that you aren't molesting him with your sword at every opportunity, he can pour on the offense. If you aren't significantly more skilled than he is, he'll get through your defenses on sheer aggression.

The most solid defense is one in which you keep your opponent worried about the possibility of getting hit himself. So long as he feels confident that you're going to bleed him if he makes a mistake, he'll have to limit his attacks. That gives you an advantage, because you *know* you aren't truly looking to exploit openings, and as a result it's far easier to defend against the more cautious attacks.

At the upper levels of the art, it becomes a psychological game more than anything. If you can figure out how to stand in his mind's shadow, so to speak, to keep the exact distance you need to put exactly the right amount of pressure on him to keep him from amping up his attacks, you can defend yourself reliably.

If he's a chump with a sword, one of your own counterstrikes that you throw just to keep him honest will get through--or else he'll try something dumb and leave you an enormous opening.

Which is not to say that any of the above is in any way related to what happened to Morgan.

One of your base assumptions is off, and it's skewing the whole theory pretty sharply from the actual backstory, but you put it together quite well. And it's barely over-paranoid at all!

>> It seems a reasonable working hypothesis that the athame is a vector for crazyness.

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It's a vector for /power/, not insanity.

At least, not directly. >

Jim

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You got to have some serious magical chops before a soulgaze is an issue--and yes, it's one of the markers that the Council uses to see if you make the cut, though it's far from the only one. There are folks running around who can do it who aren't on the Council, but not many of them.

Charity was small potatoes in the magic department, for a number of reasons. It was never an issue with her.

Jim

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LoTR is not reality in the Dresden books. Tolkien was Tolkien (and btw, that name has so much power that it's in the online SPELLCHECKER), and he wasn't the same person as the recently deceased Summer Knight.

That said, Tolkien really was heavily influenced by the Norse Mythos, blended in with a lot of Irish/Celtic stuff. Inasmuch as that is true, it is entirely possible that you might see LoTRish stuff in the Dresden universe. The chlorofiend was reasonably entlike, and the sidhe are basically darker versions of the elves, for example. And of course, anything coming in from the Nevernever might make itself a physical form that looks like a LoTR figure.

(And if one of them did a Balrog, it would have wings. Way more of a pain in Harry's ass if it has wings. )

Hey, never let it be said that the Leanansidhe wasn't doing her best to guide, protect, and help Harry.

As she understands those words, anyway.

Jim

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Fend off letters and emails (or who knows what by then, it's almost 15 years from now) from various interested parties who will doubtless be demanding more Dresden. I could probably make a full time job of *that*.

But it's depressing, really. I've worked it out, and even if I managed to discipline myself up to about 3.5 books a year, I've got enough ideas to write until I'm 85 and still not finish the books in my head. And, gosh. There are way too many boffer weapons and video games (and who knows what by then, it's almost 50 years until I'm 85) for me to go up to 3.5 books a year.

Maybe they'll get that life extension technology right, and I'll have another 30 or 40 years. But by then, I'll have had ideas for so many more books that I'll never get to finish *those*, either.

BUT, for the immediate future, here's my plans:

Alera has six books in it. I'm gonna write those, and we'll be done with Alera. I won't write off the idea of going back some day entirely, but at this time, I'm not really planning on it. Stories begin and go, and then they end. That's what stories do. If they don't end, they aren't stories--they're moneymaking franchises.

After Alera, I'll probably start in on my science fiction series, which right now is titled US Marshals. It's set in an entirely off-Earth but in-system nation, a couple of centuries in the future, when things are still sort of recognizable to what's in the present, but when genetic manipulation of human beings has begun to cause various civil, social, medical and personal problems. The off-planet society seceded from those taxation-without-representation, get-to-breathe-air-for-free parasites in Washington/London/Beijing/Et Cetera a little less than a century ago, and is something of a haven for the genetically awkward, and in the United System, it's the Marshals who keep the peace.

Plus, then there's the aliens. Earth is sort of on the receiving end of the alien version of a Prime Directive, but you know what they say: When contact is outlawed, only the outlaws make contact, and it's the United System Marshals who have to deal with them. The only aliens who ever show up are the psychos, the ones on the run from the law, religious nutballs trying to find a quiet spot, social or political extremists who had been run out of their own worlds and are looking for asylum, or general troublemakers out performing the alien equivalent of cow-tipping, which explains MOST of humanity's encounters with aliens throughout the 20th and early 21st century--and also describes most of the people who happened to show up on the shores of the Americas from Europe, back in the day.

Which is a little chilling if you stop and think about it. The Marshals have--and they have no intention of playing Montezuma to an alien Cortez. So it's up to them to protect the entire system (the idiots on the ball of mud included) by making sure that people at large remain ignorant enough of alien civilization to keep humanity protected from open contact until they can develop socially and technologically to the point where they won't be simply washed away by a much larger outside civilization that really doesn't give much of a damn about them.

So. The first book of that is halfway done. I left the protagonist hanging in a decaying orbit in just a suit, having ejected from his ship, over the surface of the moon, with a solar flare coming on, and no hope of rescue before he went roast or splat about.... what, three, four years ago? He's been there since then.

After THAT I think I'll write my EPIC Epic fantasy EPIC. With BIG THICK HONKING BOOKS. And HUNDREDS of CHARACTERS. And MAPS! And hobbits and dwarves and elves! And horses! And swords! And doom! I'm..... not sure any of those things will be recognizable as those things. Sort of how pretty much nobody recognized furies as pokemon until I pointed it out. But. Well, the horses. And the doom. Look, it's going to be EPIC and fantasy. I might have to learn a bit about sailing. Oh God. That would entail me... sailing. Dramamine. Where is my dramamine.

So that should carry me to the end of the Dresden Files. When I'm writing the final three of those, I'm doing nothing else. Gonna focus.

After THAT... Hmmmm.

Well. We'll see. The other ideas are still competing to see which falls out best. I've got ideas for three different modern-setting fantasies that /aren't/ Dresden universe books (and two that are, but aren't Harry-related), a /really/ interesting far-future Science fiction idea, and two fairly interesting fantasy ideas which both feel really neat, but which I think need more time to cook before they're ready to work on.

Always assuming, of course, that life doesn't throw me any curve balls. Those happen. Maybe there's a horrible nailgun accident and I find out I can't remember how to remember things any more. Or maybe I find out I can throw a 99 mile an hour fastball and the Yankees want me--no, wait. Then I'd have to move. Screw the Yankees. Me and my fastball would stay here and write.

But the point is that you never can tell what's going to come at you over time. In the absence of writing-ability-killing factors, though, there is my plan.

Well, like many things in life, it just isn't as simple as positive/negative, either/or. Genetics /are/ a factor. However, they are not the /only/ factor. I think I've said that at least a couple of times before this, but I'm happy to reiterate.

Look, even the simplest genetic traits are way less simple than you get in basic biology classes when they're operating in the real world. Sure, you can inherit the gene for tallness, which is dominant, but if your mom is horribly sick, or starves during the pregnancy, it's going to impact your birth and development. So is your health, environment, diet, behavior, the behavior of those around you, etc, as you grow. That tallness gene is gonna be in the mix, sure, and will be a powerful factor in determining how tall you get. But if you're an annoying little twit who gets on people's nerves so bad that someone whacks you before you turn 11, /that/ is going to have a stronger effect on your maximum height than your genetics.

While that is an overdramatic example, magical potential and heredity operates along those same lines. Charity was, essentially, stacking up environmental factors against her unborn children developing their genetic propensity for magic into a real, tangible gift to the point where the chances of them actually doing it were negligible. If Charity had been possessed of a monster gift, of if she'd been constantly around and involved in magic during the course of the pregnancy, it would have been more difficult for her to reduce it to practically zero like that. But instead, she was making a deliberate and willful choice to deny her children's potential a chance to find a chance to take root and bloom.

Maybe her kids, if they wanted, could go out and work hard and stir up a latent talent. A watershed sort of life event might do something along those lines--shake them up enough to jump-start a dormant gift. But then, that's most of humanity in the Dresden Files, really. Everyone has some kind of ability, if they just want to look hard enough to find it. That's where the Alpha's came from.

Not only is nerve regeneration not very well understood, when it /does/ happen, it's slower than hell--along the lines of a quarter inch a year or so. It does happen, though, and it isn't like it's hugely rare. I slashed open a fingertip on a razor blade that required several stitches to close, and lost all feeling in that fingertip right up to the first joint. That was when I was 19. But I slowly regained sensation in that finger, and by the time I was 26 or so, while I still have the scar, I have complete sensation back in the finger.

But at the same time, I have another finger that got slashed open on a safety blade less than six months later, requiring the same number of stitches to fix, (and, by the way, teaching me to be careful with knives) which also caused a loss of sensation--and it never did come back. C'est la vie. (Though interestingly, when I started playing guitar a couple of years ago, I started getting pins-and-needles sensation from time to time in that finger, so I suppose it's possible that using it daily--IE, therapy--might be stimulating blood flow or otherwise encouraging some form of recovery.)

There's a ton of interesting belief and theory in what might be possible for the human body--including some /really/ interesting studies that showed that in one case study, a /fake/ surgery for relieving arthritis pain proved to be /equally/ as effective as the /actual/ surgery. The placebo effect of the pretend surgery was equally as powerful as the surgery itself--right down to reducing swelling and so on. Some people have argued that this study indicates that the primary force behind modern medicine is not so much the medical practice itself, but /belief/ in the power of that practice.

What's the truth of it? I'd love to know.

Harry's abilities, though, aren't like Wolverine regen. He can just bounce back, over time, from stuff that would leave a regular human permanently crippled. And it won't last forever. Even wizards will die of old age eventually. Their bodies just perform at something like an idealized maximum of human potential, assuming that the mind really /is/ able to restore the body so effectively.

Jim

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The topic has devolved to Hitler. As soon as it gets to drugs or Hitler, that's symptomatic of a thread that is about to die (or at least *should*).

I think the points being raised about the relative values of good and evil have merits on either side of the argument. It's a big, complicated issue--you can tell, because we've all been arguing about it since we got a larynx, and a huge chunk of people on the planet /still/ don't pay much more than lip service to "good."

There's something to be said for identifying good and evil as tags applied to someone else--beauty is in the of the beholder, after all. It stands to reason that therefore ugliness is as well. We see something, and we make a judgment. Is this pretty? Is this hideous? We pick an answer, and label it "pretty" or "not pretty." But not everyone can agree on what is and isn't pretty. It's subjective to an external viewpoint.

On the other hand, I don't subscribe to the "world of all grays" philosophy, either, because I have Photoshop. You can make any shade of gray that you want--but as you start changing those RBG values around, take a look at what happens. Grey goes black WAY before you get to the actual "value" of black. Technically, yeah, it's grey. But looking at it, it's as close to black as makes no never mind.

Evil's out there. People walk into it all the time. Some of them do it with their eyes open, but the majority just sort of drift down the gradient into the dark. They're like a lobster being cooked in a slowly heated kettle of water--they begin to lose their sensitivity to the increasing intensity, and before they know it they're breathing through a plastic helmet and choking people to death with their brain.

But to correct some minor stuff: the fetches aren't even /close/ to her strongest servitors. They're her couriers, harassers, spies and occasional assassins. Captain Kudzu was a being that was deemed more-or-less sufficient on the badassometer, but nothing to write home about. The fetches main use, to Mab, isn't as battlefield thugs. She's got /plenty/ of other things for that. Another mild correction: who says Mab /lost/ the battle at Arctis Tor, before Harry and Company arrived? At the end of the day, the Winter Queen was still in her fortress--but you didn't see anyone standing around assaulting the place, did ya. Also, it has probably occurred to more than one of you that if Mab was /really/ in trouble, she could have had the entire military might of Faerie back at the fortress in moments--exactly the way they *did* come back when Harry smacked the Winter Well with the fires of Summer.

(Which goes to show that while Mab may be canny to an inhuman degree, she isn't infallible. Just way closer to infallible than us.)

See above regarding "the question is *why*?"

Ask yourself why Mab had Molly brought in. What chain of events did that set in motion? What secondary effects came about because of it? Ultimately, Mab can always go to the Wyld and draw in more muscle to replace fallen thugs. If worst comes to worst, with just a few "seed" fae, she could rear up enough Changelings to repopulate her cadre within a human generation or two--nothing, to a being thousands of years old.

As far as she's concerned, everyone and everything is expendable, including herself, when it comes to adhering to her (seemingly irrational and inexplicable) priorities.

(And by the way--don't think Titania is much better. When push came to shove, she let her own daughter be murdered rather than upset the balance of the Faerie Courts. At least Mab is up front about it. Usually.)

Sacrifice her best troops? Mab would sacrifice every creature *in* Winter, every one she could bring from Summer, and every single mortal on planet Earth if that's what she thought was appropriate. And she wouldn't even need to add extra sugar to her cup of tea afterwards, much less lose sleep over it.

But no one does cold-blooded like the Queen of Winter. Mab's been in the business a long time, she's got a balance sheet, and she is *not* going to come out in the red--

--unless, of course, she really *has* stripped a gear, as Lily and Maeve believe. In which case there's a stark raving bonkers demigoddess whose powers are no longer being held in check by the Escher-esque code of Sidhe behavior. And that's all kinds of bad.

But hey. It's probably not that. I mean, not *everything* that happens can be the absolute worst possible possibility, right?

They aren't feeding off CD music. They're feeding off various random negative energies gathered around the bad place where bad things happen. See also the things that scurry away from the light like rats but aren't rats, in Agatha Hagglethorn's demesne in Summer Knight.

What, all dogs are equally talented, the way all people are equally talented? Please. Dogs who can sense the supernatural are all over it, when it comes to protecting their adopted family, but not all dogs can "see" in that spectrum, all of the time. It doesn't make them any less good or dogly, any more than Murphy is cheapened by not being able to hurl around cosmic energy. It just means that it isn't a part of what they are.

Cats are much more likely to be sensitive to the supernatural, but their reaction to it is considerably less predictable--anything from the fluff-up-the-fur-and-hiss to the yawn-and-go-to-sleep. I mean, you just never can tell with cats, can you.

Jim

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Nah, the very foundations of the story worlds--their magic--are fundamentally incompatible. Potterverse magic is based largely upon the dictates of story drama. It's irrational, capricious, finicky, and generally doesn't make a lot of sense from any rational perspective. (Flick your wand like THIS not like THAT and say the word like THIS and not like THAT and it works.) Magic is a force unto itself, a law unto itself, and while it /does/ operate with absolute fidelity and consistency within the story world, it's beholden to no one.

Dresden universe magic is modeled more closely upon physics. Magic still has to pay attention to fundamental universal laws--such as "matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only rearranged." The energy for all those magical effects has to come from somewhere. There ain't no free lunch.

For instance, you could fly someone on a broom in the Dresden universe, but you'd have to be providing the same kind of kinetic energy you'd see from one of those James Bond rocket packs that they fly into the Superbowl from time to time--IE, a buttload. (Those packs are good for about twenty or twenty five seconds of flight, if I remember correctly, and that's it.) In the Potter universe, dozens of children who know next to nothing about magic can gad about on brooms in the afternoon for fun and recreation, and no one thinks anything of it. There's a foundational difference in the approach to how magic interacts with reality.

And yeah, Voldemort wouldn't have graduated high school in the Dresden universe. Once Tom Riddle started playing with the evil juju, someone in a grey cloak would have shown up to whack off his head and nipped him in the bud.

Unless, of course, someone more highly placed in the Council intervened on Riddle's behalf, and maybe gave the kid a little more guidance and maybe even a chance to choose a different path. Then, who knows.

Old Tom might up and do something else entirely with all that potentially-dark talent. >

Different situation entirely. Morty's powers were failing him because he didn't /believe/ in what he was doing. Remember that magic has to come out of who and what you are. It might not always be right or good, but magic absolutely /is/ always one thing: sincere. (Which is one reason why the Wardens and the Council are so hard on wizards who break the First Law.) If you make something happen with magic, it's because you truly believe that it it can and /should/ happen, that it is /right/ that it should happen. You can't lie through your teeth with magic. And what Morty was doing with his talent was borderline slimy and he knew it. And he didn't really believe in it, and as a result, his talent started failing him from time to time--which affected his confidence, which in turn made his talent even shakier, a vicious cycle. He was still trying--he had just gotten himself into a situation where he was sandbagging himself psychologically.

(It was ironic because if he really was a slimebag, his talent would have been just fine. He was actually at least a little bit of a decent guy, down deep, or there would have been no conflict between his conscience and the use of his magic.)

Charity's situation was another animal entirely: she was deliberately abandoning the use of her talent. And while riding a bicycle isn't something you forget--it isn't terribly complicated, either.

Pretty much anyone can learn to ride a bicycle. Not just anyone can learn to be a professional concert violinist. And of those who can, the ones who do must spend /years/ learning how, spend endless hours in practice, and /continue/ to practice if they wish to keep their skills. If they simply stop playing violin for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, and then go to pick it up again, they are /not/ going to have the skills they had before.

In the case of a violinist, they're going to be able to play something, but not at the skill level they once had--and without the hardened fingertips that a violinist needs, they won't be able to play for very long at all, before their fingers start bleeding. In short, they aren't professional violinists any more--and that's just on the technical level. Factor in all the other considerations that come into play. They haven't been sight reading music regularly. They won't be able to do that again for some time. They haven't been keeping up with the music in popular performance. They don't know the pieces currently in vogue. They don't have contacts in the industry, while many others do--it's going to be much more difficult for them to find a job (even if they could pass an audition, which they couldn't).

In short--they aren't a concert violinist any more.

Could they get all that back again? The technical skills, the contacts, the awareness of the business end? Maybe. Maybe they'd be willing to go back to square one again, live in the tiny apartment and eat a lot of ramen noodles again while they looked for work, practiced on the sidewalk with the violin case open to beg for coins from passersby again, until they could build up enough of their skills, contacts, etc, to re-enter the field. But it would take a person of extraordinary character or motivation to go through that twice.

(Hell, I'm not sure I could go through the breaking-into-the-field process for writing again. It's freaking grueling.)

Wizardry, in the Dresden books, is much the same way. Being a wizard isn't a simple skill, like riding a bike. It's a complicated talent with /many/ different aspects, all of which have to work together to cause an effect--IE, a spell. If you neglect that group of talents over the course of years, regaining them and getting them all to work together again would be extremely difficult, if it was possible at all.

This is /especially/ the case if you consciously, knowingly abandon your magic--because you've made the decision that abandoning your magic is the right and proper thing to do, and that therefore by extension, any use of your magic talent is implicitly /wrong/. You've essentially turned the power of your own magic against itself.

In the Dresden books, you /can/ annihilate your own talent. But then, you can pretty much do that with any given talent you have in the real world, too, in one fashion or another.

You are of course free to make that Calavaras Countylike bound of assumption.

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As to hoping about their feeding methods, Vampires drink blood. THat's staple. While I liek the way Jim has done different types, I really do hope he doesn't drift too far from that.

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Exactly. Well, except for the White Court, which doesn't drink blood, but life energy. And which constitutes a hair under HALF the vampires that have actually appeared in the story world.

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That said, it's Jim's universe, he'll write what he likes!!

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Ah, but unfortunately, Jim's universe has to pay for Jim's house, so it doesn't get put together /completely/ according to my personal whims. I usually spend, I dunno, maybe ten or even fifteen minutes thinking of what the fans want each and every time I write a book!

I'm just curious, but--since when is fallibility a /right/? I mean sure, it would be really nice if, whenever anyone took up an office of enormous power they suddenly lost the ability to make mistakes. But I'm fairly sure there's some empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that it doesn't work like that.

The real irony here is that someone like the Merlin agrees completely with the core of your statement--and the "oops" he's determined to avoid is Apocalypse Harry.

And it's just a shade over 6 feet long. (Kincaid's spear was /not/ a lengthy one--about four feet of haft with an 18 inch head with crosspieces at the base of the head. Actual boarspears were longer, but you didn't generally hunt boars inside basements, the way Kincaid was hunting vampires.)

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Sword Cane - We've only seen this one a couple of times. It has some runes on it, I think allowing him to perform something not dissimilar to telekinesis.

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Most of Harry's TK stuff is wind based (ventas servitas!) or force-based (forzare!). The sword cane was actually a focus geared toward earth-magic (magnetism).

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Duster - Harry's original canvas duster had some spells woven into it, but his leather duster - a gift from Susan - has some pretty major protections. Unlike the shield bracelet, these spells use no willpower from harry. They apparently make it hard to penetrate the duster and dissipate kinetic energy. This provides good protection from teeth and claws, and helps against but won't stop a bullet.

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Not only will it stop a bullet, it stopped /assault rifle/ bullets. Harry's wearing protection which is effectively equivalent to the new Dragonscale body armor, there.

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Ring(s) - Elaine uses a number of rings. Their purposes have not been explained.

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Actually, one has been--one of Elaine's rings, the one she used on the "unicorn," specifically. It's a gizmo a great deal like Harry's original energy ring, only instead of storing back kinetic energy, it stores random short-term memories. That's why Harry walked into a memory of walking down a sunlit sidewalk when one of those little sparks hit him. Now imagine getting hit with, oh, let's stay a hundred and FIFTY abrupt, random, utterly unconnected yet virtually real hallucination-memories. That'll take ya a minute or two to sort out.

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Thorn Wand - a carved wooden wand which looks like a very large thorn, this seems to be equivalent to Harry's blasting rod.

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But with lightning.

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Gauntlet - Ramirez has a glove made of segmented metal plates with what Harry tentatively identifies as Olmec or Aztec writing. Seems to work like Harry's shield bracelet, probably more like 1.0 than 2.0.

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Oh not even remotely. Ramirez's gauntlet works with entropy-magic (a sub specialty of water magic--all things flowing, constantly changing and shifting, but never gone). The field it creates is essentially a screen of pure entropy which breaks down the molecular bonds of things that go through it. It projects what amounts to a disintegration screen. Not pure and perfect disintegration, but fifty percent disintegrated is generally enough to get the job done.

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Robe - As is mentioned in Summer Knight, wizards attending a council meeting are required to wear a robe. Apprentices wear black robes (likely this hearkens to Medieval students, who were also required to garb themselves in black). Full-fledged wizards have more leeway, but Harry incensed the old guard by wearing a flannel bathrobe.

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Wizards wear black robes, and denote their rank, status, titles, etc by the color of their stole. Apprentices wear brown robes (like the one Ramirez had on in his uncredited appearance in Summer Knight, or the one Harry presents to Molly in PG).

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Swords - All Wardens prior to Harry are armed with a sword which is apparently able to cut through anything, and which can destroy any enchantment. As Luccio explained in White Night, these swords are unique for each Warden, and were all made by Luccio. With her recent body-swap, Luccio no longer has the ability to make more swords, thus Harry has not been provided with one. Luccio refers to her "design", implying that there is a common language for creating such items, and therefore another wizard may be able to make these swords in the future.

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They don't cut through anything. They are super good for cutting through/disrupting fields of magical energy. They rip through magic-charged ectoplasm of the nevernever, like the kind demons make when they need a body to inhabit in the real world, like there's no tomorrow. Otherwise, they are simply swords created by a master of the craft with centuries of experience from the finest alloys available at the time of their creation.

On this topic, just summarizing a few posts which hit upon key points:

Practically speaking, most of magic is in the mind.

Use of black magic warps your mind.

Corpsetaker had taken a LOT of bodies. Luccio's switched one time.

Luccio was a victim in the transfer, not the one controlling it (and taking advantage of it).

Oh, and I'll add one for myself: Corpsetaker wasn't what anyone would characterize as a conscientious housekeeper. Mwoo hah.

Jim

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Quote from: Priscellie on March 24, 2007, 11:03:03 PM
As for Ramirez, we know he's younger than Billy, who is a college Freshman or Sophomore at the time of "Fool Moon." Ramirez is near the end of his apprenticeship in "Summer Knight," so we can easily assume he was in his teens when he began said apprenticeship. He suggests in "Dead Beat" that he was an apprentice at the time of Harry's trial for Justin's death, but as he could only have been a maximum of 8 years old at the time, I tend to think Jim slipped up on that point. (And hey, the younger Ramirez is, the easier it is to ship him with Molly!)

Actually, he was talking about Harry's confrontation with the White Council in "Summer Knight." If you read the scene with the Senior Council again, there's a mention of a young apprentice in a brown robe hiding a grin behind one hand.

Our state has a lot of dumb rules. It's illegal to conceal a weapon in your glove box, but legal to leave it on the dash. I don't know about you but I don't want to go through a traffic stop with a gun on my dash. I don't think my torso needs air holes.

Under Illinois law, a PI can get a concealed carry license--but not under /Chicago/ law, which is restrictive on guns to the point of insanity, legislation that has been enacted in an effort to reduce the sheer volume of firearms in the city, hopefully with the consequence of fewer firearms-oriented crimes. The only people who still have concealed carry permits in Chicago are those who already had them before they were restricted, via a grandfather clause. That happened in the 80s, though, so they're eventually gonna run out of people who have permits.

Ah. But what did he have to DO to ressurect his dead love, is the question. Bob says "he crossed the line. Several times." And while the magic isn't being depicted from the same angle as the books, there /are/ several similarities in the rules that govern magic, one of which is: you don't get something for nothing. The forces of magic exist in balance. I mean, if you want to bring back someone from the dead, it's only reasonable that someone /else/ must . . .

Jim

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"Neither does drinking blood from someone sick, who is an addict or has a physical disability will harm them."

White Wolf, who get most of their ideas from other stories (which is the point of the system, so that's not a bad thing), has rules about how drinking from people who are drugged will affect them. Other stories have blood-born diseases affecting vampires. Chris Moore's new book gives a vamp a hangover from drinking from a drunk.

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"*Please.* If EVERY vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually THERE, it would have been like Woodstock. I was actually *at* Woodstock. Freaky gig. I fed on a flower person and spent the next five hours watching my hand move."

There are about a million things that can switch faces in the books, and that kind of simple illusion (which we haven't seen a lot of in the books, because Harry isn't good at it) isn't even considered /remarkable/ among wizards, much less extremely dark and/or evil.

Corpsetaker didn't change faces. She /stole/ /bodies/. She ripped minds out of their natural bodies and plopped them down in others. And /that/ is considered dark and evil magic.

Book-version Ancient Mai looks good for her age, but since she's over 400 that's not necessarily saying a lot. She's just kinda remarkably well-preserved for her age, like the chick who played Wonder Woman on TV. She by no means looks young...

...which is why the face thing got added on to TV. They cast Elizabeth Thai as her actress, so in the pilot, Mai looks like a pretty young thang until she gets angry and then her face starts slipping, and the nearly-inhuman features of someone ridiculously old and not altered by more than her share of serious magic over years of time. TV-Mai is about a thousand, she might not be altogether human any more, and she has to use magic to pass.

Mai's actress got replaced between the pilot and "Bad Blood," hence Harry adding the line "that's a new look for you."

I question whether or not he would try to pop Harry. I'm certain he wouldn't do it directly, though. The Council in the TV show is a whole heaping helping more unfriendly than in the books, from what I've seen, and unless Sirota had some big backing ready to go to the mat, he'd be asking for a lot of pain by openly wiping out a Wizard. Scragging some random schmuck mortal who was dumb enough to get Faustian is a totally different circumstance, politically speaking.

On the other hand, if he arranged for Harry to buy it by some other means, like an intermediary or an "accident", and it couldn't be clearly traced back to him, the Council might just shrug and move along. They're a seriously realpolitik kind of organization.

It certainly wouldn't look the same if he'd Seen her when she was loaded on sleeping meds and booze in a half-crazy bid to outrun her night terrors.

Jim

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Not only would the Western-raised wizard and Eastern-raised wizard perceive things according to the cultural biases and subjective experiences, they might not even perceive them with the same /senses/.

The Third Sight is different for everyone, subjective, and inherently slanted towards ones own experiences and background. So while two wizards might look on some totally-gone, bloodthirsty warlock and see a bloodthirsty warlock, they might see it in very different ways.

Maybe Harry looks on him and sees some Hannibal-Lectery figure crouched on the floor grinning and soaked in blood. But maybe Ancient Mai looks on him and sees a bare, twisted white tree in the center of an unbroken field of white snow, representative of the individual's loss of spirit and humanity. And maybe Rodriguez looks at him and hears some kind of hideous music that accompanies the individual and makes the hair on the back of Carlos' neck stand up. Maybe Klaus the Toymaker looks at them and sees that his head is covered in cracks and flaws, and that underneath the parts where the flesh looks chipped away, something rotten and horrible is underneath. Maybe Listens-to-Wind looks on the warlock and smells something rotted and vile.

It's way different for each wizard, and it's why even though soulgazes and third sight can be used as evidence in, for example, warlock trials, there is also room for argument and interpretation--that's how Ebenezar defended Dresden, for example. He claimed that he Saw more than just "murdering warlock."

Plus, it isn't flawless. I mean, if a wizard looks at someone who has just suffered some kind of horrible physical or emotional injury, he gets a much different picture of that person than if he sees them a week sooner, or a year later. If a wizard looks on someone who is in a towering rage at the moment, it's going to have an effect on what is Seen. Maybe not an enormous effect, true, but at times even a little bit of difference in shading can change the overall picture. Oh, plus if the /Wizard/ is in a radically altered state of mind, it can shade things differently, too.

Ultimately, the Sight is something that is best relied upon for making one's own decisions, for supporting one's intuitions and observations--as long as one remembers that while it is always true, it isn't always completely correct. Circumstance can, at tmes, effect what is Seen.

All the Wardens did, and the Senior Council, and several of the more responsible/combat-capable wizards who weren't either of the former (like Ebenezar, Klaus the Toymaker, and the Germans). But it wasn't literally the entire Council. Plenty of the wizards there have got precious little gift when it comes to actual combat magic--like Ancient Mai. Their strengths simply lie in other areas. Others . . . just aren't suited to it, mentally, and could probably prove to be more of a liability than an asset. Some of them are just plain chicken.

But it was a more sizeable chunk of the Council than had, at that point, ever been all together in one place to take on /one/ guy.

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They murdered, with magic.
They broke the laws. Are they all tainted?

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Technically, they didn't actually kill him with magic. They rendered him helpless with magic and then found other ways to execute him. (Swords are the usual. For Kemmler, they also used guns, axes, shovels, ropes, a flamethrower, and a number of other extremes.) It's a semantic difference, in some ways, but an important technical distinction in others.

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Note also the killing law only applies to Humans.
You can kill as many faeries as you want with magic.

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Bingo. It hardly seems fair, does it?

The Laws of Magic don't necessarily match up to the actual universal guidelines to how the universal power known as "magic" behaves.

The consequences for breaking the Laws of Magic don't all come from people wearing grey cloaks.

And none of it necessarily has anything to do with what is Right or Wrong.

Which exist. It's finding where they start or stop existing that's the hard part.

Jim

PS--"sinister" as in "bend sinister" or "bar sinister" is a general term originally meaning "left," and not "evil." However, there's some overlap in traditional magickal terms, with references to the "left hand path" or black magic, and so on. Left handed people were often viewed with suspicion during the middle ages. In Islamic belief, the left hand is considered to be unclean. For that matter, the entire concept of "right" is tied in with the negative connotations to "left."

And I agree. Harry has some sinister leanings.

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Something to do with the environment here, too. You can't have any foreign objects interrupt the circle. But since the circle was being made out of earth and twigs and leaves, it isn't going to be disrupted by earth and twigs and leaves. It still could have been /broken/ by one of them, if any of them had actually marred the circle drawn in the earth, so that it wasn't a complete shape any more (not just fallen over it). For that matter, if Toot had scuffed his foot through the circle on accident on the way in, that could have blown the trap, too.

Different situation with a big copper circle in a smooth concrete floor. I mean, I suppose Harry could have made a circle out of, I dunno, dirty laundry or something, and other dirty laundry laying across it could obscure it without breaking it. But then if the wrong sock gets shifted, pift, no circle any more. Much safer to go with the big metal circle in the floor that you know isn't going to be broken, and just take extra pains to make sure nothing falls across it.

Harry was never exactly the run in the book-verse. Lea helped boost his magical muscle (mostly by boosting his confidence) before he went up against Justin. Harry laid low from Justin between the time Harry waxed He Who Walks Behind and when Harry went back to settle up with DuMorne). Then he slugged it out with Justin, burned down the only thing he'd ever had that was close to a home, apparently killing the girl he loved in the process, and got snatched by the Wardens at the scene.

TV-verse it works out a bit differently, starting with the fact that Harry himself was quite a bit older when the showdown with Justin happened. The actual interaction with Bianca in "Bad Blood" is totally different than the books, but extremely Harry. I mean, if someone like TV-Bianca had ever stumbled over book-Harry in the midst of his entire lifetime's single biggest moment of vulnerability . . .

My call on it is that Bianca is partaking much more heavily of Lara Raith's vibe than the Leanansidhe's. There's a little more peer-to-peer respect to their interactions, rather than the quasi-condescending vibe from the Godmother. More than that, though, the book Bianca was a fundamentally frightened and insecure person. It was what made her dangerous, really, and it's ultimately what got her killed.

Lara's a much stronger (not-quite)person, much more confident, much more dangerous, even if she isn't as physically formidable as book-Bianca was. She's much more of a player, leader, seducer than book-Bianca, and far better able to mess with Dresden's head.

Actually, in Wolfen they were just wolves. Really smart, sure, but wolves. The Alphas (once they grew up) were based largely upon the kind of werewolf used in Wolfen. Not monstrously huge, not monstrously strong, not monstrously invulnerable--just /wolves/, and scary because humanity today doesn't really remember just how physically formidable wolves are. I mean, there's a REASON wolves are featured very prominently in scary stories from all over the world and why they're /still/ psychological boogeymen, even if they had to be upgraded to werewolves.

Personally, I dug the freaky looking prehistoric quasi-wolf from American Werewolf In London, which is why I wrote the loup-garou to be something like that.

I'm trying to think of a movie made before VtM and WWtA that used the crinos-style bipedal monstrous werewolf, and I'm drawing a bit of a blank. Somebody must have, but if so I can't remember who.

Oh, wait, no I remember. The Howling! And then Howling II (Your Sister Is A Werewolf)! Howling II remains near the top of my best awful movies of all time list--mostly, I suspect, because Sybill Danning rips her shirt off thirteen times during the closing credits. 8D

Jim

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Also, one might want to bear in mind that the FBI lovebirds weren't really a part of the supernatural community. Sure, Rankin got exposed to something bad, and they did manage to find something that might have gotten her out of it, but that doesn't automatically equate to a vast knowledge of the supernatural. It's doubtful that they even heard of the Council, even assuming they found out that wizards were real.

(I tend to think they didn't know about wizards at all, or they'd probably have gone looking for a solution from one, like Dresden's elixir, rather than immediately hopping the Serial Killer Express.)

In any case, those two clearly had no real clue what Dresden could do. They just knew that he had seen what they were doing and had to be removed. So why /not/ kick down his door? Hell, they'd been tag-team murdering monsters out of people's nightmares for weeks. Dresden was just this somewhat scruffy guy who knew a few tricks.

That's the suck part about being part of a secret society. You can't graft their rep onto yours for the intimidation factor if nobody knows about them.

Jim

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Quote from: jmsilverwolf on February 12, 2007, 12:25:30 PM
Harry has admitted (I think in SF) that he'd never even heard of the White Council until Morgan showed up to drag him before a trial. All of his experiences with being a wizard before than come from Justin DuMorne, who from all accounts was neither warm nor fuzzy. If memory serves, Harry mentions Justin using pain as a motivator on a couple different occasions. Which of course really means he was using fear.

Fear is an extremely effective, albeit unpleasant, teaching tool. Human psychology is built that way. Introduce enough fear into a situation, and a great many psychological barriers can be immediately, permanently bypassed. That's why traumatic experiences leave such huge mental scars on people. Sure, maybe you like dogs fine, but if you get mauled half to death by four or five of them, it can change your outlook on the subject. My dog got a claw on his back leg half-ripped out by getting it tangled in something, and the vet had to pull it the rest of the way out so that it could heal. Now he doesn't let ANYONE touch that back paw.

Using fear to a lesser (or more at least more precise) degree lets you drive home lessons a lot faster than you would, otherwise. Believe me, getting repeatedly popped on top of the noggin teaches you faster than anything that your high block isn't high enough. Experiencing what a properly applied grappling lock actually /does/ to you teaches you faster than anything how /not/ to get caught in one--they HURT. And I mean, HURT, a kind of pain that you just don't get to feel, most days.

While I don't exactly back fear-oriented academia, it /is/ an awfully good way to teach people things that are going to be matters of life-and-death, such as hand-to-hand combat. Or, in DuMorne's case, high-stakes wizardry.

Pain wasn't a teaching method for DuMorne. It was an environment. You learned to do /everything/ while in pain, because when it comes to actual wizardly conflict, you'd better be able to concentrate and focus, even if you've got two bullets in your guts, or if you're on fire. DuMorne knew darned well that when you go up against Wardens, you don't do it without taking some lumps along the way.

No wards on the office. To build a ward, you have to use a threshold of some kind. (Well, you can use other kinds of similar energy structures, like ley lines, ogham stones, etc, but you can't just slap them down anywhere.) No wards on Harry's office in the books for that reason.

The office doesn't have a whole hell of a lot of "home" energy around it. Virtually none. I mean, a hotel room would have more. Harry could probably sling up some kind of tripwire-rings-a-bell equivalent ward, if he wanted to, but even that would be tricky and he has better ways to spend his time and effort.

However. To repeat something I have SAID OVER AND EFFING OVER, THE TV SHOW IS NOT THE SAME THING AS THE BOOK. NOR SHOULD IT BE.

I mean, Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to type that? OF COURSE, if you PERSIST in basing every evaluation of the show by the yardstick of "how close is it to the books" it isn't going to measure up terribly well.

This is very nearly as frustrating as reading these huge disappointed reviews of the Codex Alera because "they aren't like the Dresden books at all." Which is exactly true. The Alera books are TERRIBLE Dresden novels. Apples make AWFUL oranges. DUH!

Bear in mind that Harry thought the box was awfully dark juju. And I've seen episodes enough to know that this incarnation of Harry, like the original, has no qualms about blowing the living crud out of supernatural nasties by means of explosive magic. There aren't any Council laws about it, either. If all the box did was ticktickticktickBOOM, that wouldn't really make it black magic. Just violent magic.

I gotta figure that the box wasn't just a Jokey Smurf booby trap. It was a booby trap with a lure built into it--a fascination or compulsion, invasive mind magic, which *IS* black as the pits of hell. Harry did rather make it a point to wave it around and draw her attention to it, and keep her attention focused on it with his dialogue. ("You are feeling covetous. Verrrrrry covetous...")

And sure enough she *did* stare and drool at it when she damn well should have known better. The black magic in the box wasn't the earth-shattering kaboom, but the compulsion that made you want to pick it up and see what was inside.

Cause that's just . . . wrong. Effective as hell, but definitely twisted, and well worthy of being in a book of magic so black that Harry torched it.

Well. Not trying to stick an icepick in anybody, but this argument needs some kind of, I dunno, logically deduced background by which to judge the value of Harry's actions at the end of the ep. To wit, what was he supposed to do about it?

The Skinwalker got blasted to dust. Not many answers there. He knows that someone's moving around out in the shadows, but that's ALL, and even that only comes through an informed guess. Should Harry have started knocking on doors and asking people "hey, did you hire that skinwalker to take the little kid?" Should he have moved in with them to provide 24/7 coverage? Told them to go into hiding, running from place to place, never having a home--which was sort of the POINT of why Harry took on the skinwalker to begin with: it isn't enough to just survive. He wanted the kid to have a /life/.

The kid still has 24/7 mercenary bodyguards, courtesy of the High Council. The kid and his mom both are now forewarned to be on the lookout for that kind of thing--and it seems fairly obvious that if bad things start happening again, they're going to have Harry's number on their speed dial. They're going to take those protection symbols seriously in the future, too.

In short, mommy and kidlet are better off in EVERY WAY than they were at the beginning of the ep: the kid is safer, the mom wiser, the ravens are still on the job. There are no leads for Harry to follow, regarding whoever had hired the skinwalker. Yeah, the ending didn't have a nifty Christmas bow on it, but sometimes you settle for what you can get--and in this case, it's an imperfect situation that could be a hell of a lot worse.

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Harry was in a very sexual relationship with Susan and he's not a virgin. He hit a dry spell by Storm front. Let's not forget that Harry has no conjunctions against pre-marital sex, Dresden doesn't sleep around now because he's in love with Murphy. The character clearly isn't yet in the series.

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While the pentacle has changed form, it's still a symbol of his faith in magic. It's now just a family heirloom bracelet.

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Actually, to the best of my knowledge he still has the pentacle. He just also inherited the bracelet.

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Susan was the exception, not the rule.

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True enough, as it goes. Though she was largely the exception because she said "yes."

Harry had nothing against a friendly tumble where he started. But as the books have gone on, he's become increasingly aware of his responsibilities--and of the potential danger to anyone involved in said tumble. Since the war broke out (and perhaps even more since Susan was changed) Harry really doesn't feel like turning anyone else into a target for the sake of a little meaningless fun.

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Aside from her, Harry was practically a born-again virgin. Bob constantly lays into him about it ("Harry, what you know about women, I could juggle"). His feelings for Murphy have nothing to do with why he's not getting any action - Jim's been very careful to make that clear to us. Harry is hardly a lady's man.

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And he BLEW IT COMPLETELY with a WAITRESS from the DINER (whom he obviously cared about beyond mere sexual interest) in the first ten minutes of the episode. It isn't like he woke up in bed with Carmen Electra, Angelina Jolie and the Swedish Bikini Team. I mean, honestly. How is the show supposed to show his horrible luck with women if not by showing . . . his HORRIBLE LUCK WITH WOMEN.

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Regarding the snark comment, Amber said it best. I mean, when has the situation ever dampened Harry's sarcasm?

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When he was standing outside Victor Sells' lake house, when the loup-garou slaughtered and maimed a bunch of cops, when Susan got vampirized and he was locked in a room with her, when he was sinking in quicksand while bound in Elaine's paralysis spell, when Shiro died, when Thomas told him about their mother, when Morgan was about to kill him just before the Darkhallow, when he was facing down the White Council over Molly . . . There are lots of things that bump Harry out of snarkmode.

I saw him delivering snark where he delivers it most in the books--when he's in a lot of danger and pain and someone is trying to intimidate him. Best line in the ep, from my side, is when, after LITERALLY treating him like a human punching bag for a while, the skinwalker threatens to peel his banana for him and he instantly slurs, "That should keep me out of trouble."

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Harry would NEVER blow a child's fears off. He would NEVER tell a child that monsters aren't real. He KNOWS better.

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What, he never has a bad day? He would never make a mistaken judgment? He would never allow the bone-deep issues left over from his past to color his perceptions of the present? (HAH!) He would never overcompensate for an impulse to take the kid's money by "protecting" the kid from his own financial need (the way he "protected" Murphy from the big bad supernatural world by keeping her in the dark about it)?

He sure as hell didn't believe Molly when she told him that "no really, my boyfriend is innocent and there really are supernatural bad things happening" until after Michael had asked him to keep an eye on her and he investigated the situation more closely. He all but blew Lydia off in Grave Peril, when she came to him claiming to have foreseen her own death, and he wound up (Hah!) giving her a magical gizmo to protect her from what she was afraid of and sending her off to someplace he thought was safe enough for a paranoid with delusions of supernatural persecution.

Be patient, kids. TV can't develop things in the same manner as a book. It's paced differently. Dresden doesn't start the TV series where he's currently at in the books. And the show encompasses multiple VIEWPOINTS, which the books don't. IE, he isn't always on stage to get his stuff developed.

Every weekly episode covers about the same amount of story events as a 20 or 25 page short story. Twenty five pages of Storm Front does NOT give you a coherent picture of the whole series. Nor should the first weekly ep of the show give you a complete picture of the entire season.

In addition, a lot of the nitpicks I've read are the result of what I can only assume are the viewer's prejudices. Comments about the lack of pentacle? Please. Absence of proof does not equal proof of absence.

Clever observations about the lack of threshold? In the first place, that room they were in was his office--you can tell from the glass front door (which Melissa came in) that says "Harry Dresden--Wizard." It's a public area. No threshold. In the second place, even if there HAD been a threshold, it wouldn't have done diddly to stop any number of supernatural baddies. The fetches in PG hammered down the /Carpenters'/ front door, and that's a threshold like the rock of frickin' Gibraltar. The loup-garou sneered at such things. A threshold wouldn't slow down a Denarian for a moment, nor would it stop ghouls, ogres, or any number of largely physical (as opposed to manifested spiritual) beings. And even if the skinwalker had been something summoned from the Nevernever into a manifested physical body, the toad demon was one of those too, and IT stomped through Harry's pathetic threshold in the very first book.

In other words--from what I can see, they're /being/ true to the books in a GREAT MANY WAYS.

Benefit of the doubt, guys, before you assume that the people who are working so hard on this thing must obviously suffer from cranial-rectal inversion. I don't think it's a stretch to say that I know this character and his world at least as well as anyone else--and everything I've seen of the show's production makes me feel confident that they've actually thought most of this through, and are doing a pretty good job with it.

I've said this about a hundred and fifty million times, and I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me say it, so this will be the last time (probably):

Sit back, watch the show, try to have some fun with it. It isn't a clone of the books, nor should it be, and it's possible that it will be good anyway.

Yeah. Fricking brilliant addition. Wish I'd thought of that when I was putting the series together. Could have held out for the first two books and then revealed the kid when Harry goes to her house and finds her severely depressed after the death of her first husband. Would have utterly shifted the color of light on Murphy, been a really nasty blindside shot to reader expectations.

Plus, the opportunity for ongoing drama/interaction would have been cool to play with. But, that's what happens when you plan a series when you're too inexperienced to know it won't possibly fly, and then it up and bumblebees its way into the air anyhow.

Jim

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Quote from: Grise on January 18, 2007, 07:48:40 AM
The 'Harry screws up guns' thing hasn't been seen for several novels now, and I sincerely hope it's something JB has decided to let go to dust. First away, if Harry's disruption thing is so bad that it can mess up simple chemistry and even simpler mechanical operations, then howinblazes does his car ever work? Orders of magnitude more complex, mechanically, chemically, and electrically speaking...

On the other hand, using a GUN in earnest tends to be a tad more emotionally (and therefore magically) engaging than your average drive in a car. Proximity has a lot to do with it, too. Harry's actually TOUCHING the gun, generally in his right hand (the hand that projects magical energy) to boot. In fact, the gun is small enough that it's actually going to be encompassed by his bioelectric field (a very mild, but totally individual field of electromagnetic energy that the human body produces).

The car is a much larger (relative) object that is (relatively) farther away, even when Harry is driving under stress--and even so, the Beetle (and other cars) have broken down on-stage more often than guns have actually jammed on-stage.

And there are other factors involved of which Harry is not entirely aware. Alas, that the viewpoint character is non-omniscient.

The rules aren't changing. The proper circumstances just haven't all aligned the way they have in the other instances of guns glitching.

Discussed before, I think, but I can give the summary version here: Using magick in the Dresden universe is like absolutely any other activity. Some people are born great at it. Some people are born with no skill whatsoever. Some people spend a lot of time and effort increasing their innate talent, and hard work can make up a lot of the difference in innate talent. Some people born with a fantastic talent never realize they have it, and consequently never use it, or develop it. Talents left undeveloped tend to wither away, and even the talented, if they don't work and practice, can't ever be really first rate.

So, a wizard like Harry is someone born with a tremendous talent for accessing magic, and then they spend a lot of time working and developing that talent. Someone like Victor had some kind of innate talent, made a deal to get themselves a bunch of extra power, but while they might have the same kind of "musclepower" Harry has (or at least been in his weight class), someone like that doesn't have Harry's experience or skill.

Put it in brawling terms. Victor was a big, mean, strong guy made dangerous by LSD and too much booze. Dresden, by comparison, is a professional heavyweight martial artist/bouncer/bodyguard well versed in real combat. Now, that big mean drunk might, if the professional is stupid or taken off guard, smash his face into the concrete. But part of being a pro means being alert and careful in a potential confrontation. If he can face the drunk on his feet and alert, he'll beat the drunk most of the time. Probably.

(Real fighting, alas, is extremely chaotic and unpredictable and even being the best is no protection against bad judgment or simply bad luck.)

Anyway. Most people could probably do SOMETHING with magic, just like most people could probably learn to sing a little. Some people are just born with an incredible voice, and training only enhances them. Others can't carry a tune in a bucket, and no amount of training will ever do them much good. But there's a world of difference between an American Idol winner and, well, all the people they love to show on the first several audition episodes.

Of course, you can cheat a little more easily when it comes to magic. I suppose you can cheat when it comes to sports, via using steroids and so on, though it isn't as simple to cheat at singing. Cheating with magic generally involves you trading something to something bad to give you more power. It doesn't make you any more skilled at USING that power, and you generally have to be stupid or desperate to make the deal to begin with, but you CAN cheat. There are benign sources of power out there, who might be happy to help you, but the truly benevolent among such beings generally help you get stronger by, say, giving you lessons, or encouraging you to work out, rather than just dumping it onto your head. Bottom line: there ain't no free lunch.

Hrothbert (Old English for "Robert") of Bainbridge was Bob's name when he was a living wizard, who went warlock, and wound up taking an axe blow to the back of the head as a result. (You can see the axe wound in the skull prop on the show.) He's essentially a ghost, cursed to haunt his own skull for all eternity, and he simultaneously serves as 1) a potential source of serious black magic lore/temptation for Harry and 2) a living morality play about why wizards shouldn't play with black magic. He's all for supporting Harry, for various reasons, not the least of which is that it was Bob, and not Justin, who taught Harry his magical basics--Justin being far too busy and important for such things. He let Bob do the dreary part, and then took over once Harry got his magical black belt.

Anyway, Bob is not exactly a sterling soul. He's trying to be a better individual, but he's also been stuck in a kind of impotent purgatory for several centuries and there's a certain taint of disinterested amorality to his outlook as a result. The whole good/evil thing is sort of a nonissue with him--except as it pertains to how Harry is going to react to things. He's not into good guys and bad guys as much as he is into "us" and "them," with Harry being the "us." He and Harry share a similar vibe of having done dark things in the past but attempting to rise above them.

When it comes to magic, he can't do it himself any more, and he can't interact with anything physically, but he bears a certain amount of professional pride. Oh sure, some of the stuff he did was black as hell, but it was frickin' elegant, dammit. Just look at those formulae! Sure, he was a fool to go down that road, but since he was going down it anyway, he did it in style!

Anyway, in the wake of Justin's demise, the High Council apparently judged that Bob would be a good Jiminy Cricket for Dresden--and, the way their twisty minds work, they probably planned to use him as a snitch/informer/witness for the prosecution if Dresden started getting out of line again.

And, since he's had several centuries with no way to attack anyone or defend himself except in conversation (but no way for anyone to really shut him up, either), he's developed a nuclear arsenal of snide. Try to imagine if Batman's Alfred had been played by Tim Curry with dialogue by John Cleese.

So, NOT Bob the skull, though he serves exactly the same purpose from a story-craft standpoint. He's more human, better able to interact with Harry and others--and able to talk about serious stuff, too, which makes him a better confidant-character for the show. The books Bob is essentially a hypergenius thirteen-year-old on a Red Bull IV (Well, while in Harry's possession, anyway.) The TV Bob is one possible tragic mirror of Dresden himself, as well as a former mentor, a nosy roommate, and a kind of curmudgeonly foster uncle.

Hey, the board said SPOILERS.

Jim

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I have returned from the wild and exotic city of Toronto in the far away land of Canada!

Let me tell you something, in case no one ever has before: Making a TV show is freaking hard work. The crews work six and seven days a week, and they average fourteen hour days, with one break of less than an hour for lunch. This week, I would get to the set between 7 and 9 am, stay until 8 to 10 pm at night, and then go back to my hotel room and spend another four or five hours banging away on my next book. Eat in there, somewhere. Sleep whenever it wasn't too inconvenient.

Apologies to those who had hoped to get together with me during this visit, but see above re: hours being worked.

I have now visited the new set, seen all of the principals in action, and have even seen two full episodes in early post-production drafts, and I now officially hereby retract what has, until now, been a moderately positive opinion about the upcoming series.

Because I think the show is going to kick some serious ass. I want to watch it. Now, please. Hurry up, come on people, more show.

Some quick thoughts on the revised version of Bob: he does exactly the same thing for the story as the original Bob. He just doesn't cost an extra zillion bucks a show, and can participate a little more in what's going on in Harry's life, emotionally speaking. Terrance Mann is a freaking riot, just as snarky as you could wish, and he can flip from /scathing/ sarcasm to serious drama in the blink of a freaking eye. Highly approve.

Paul Blackthorne works himself hard on this show, and from what I can see has earned some respect from the crew and his fellow cast members. He plays an excellent Dresden--though he gets laid more than the in-books Harry, partly thanks to the show doing a lot of flipping back and forth in time. They cover quite a bit of Harry's backstory as they go through the season, from when he was a kid travelling around with his stage magician dad, to when he was taken in by Justin, to later in life, when he was a grown adult who had not yet learned of Justin's treachery. Story details have been altered, but nothing enormous, and (more importantly) none of it done capriciously or stupidly.

And Dresden gets beaten like a frickin' drum. In the two episodes I watched and half-episode I saw filmed, he was hung by his heels from the rafters and turned into a literal human punching bag, sucker punched unconscious, tortured/interrogated three times, tasered once, shot with a crossbow twice, bashed unconscious with a table, drained of life-force twice, gave himself psychic migraines using dangerous magic twice, had his fricking /skin/ partially ripped off, abducted twice, and handcuffed/restrained twice. More, if you count the pilot.

Mmmmm. That's good sufferin'. No wonder Paul, when asked about how he'd like to see Dresden evolve, respond with something along the lines of "Evolve? I just want to see him /survive/."

I also got to look at a bunch of the effects, which are largely running on a "less is more" philosophy that stresses subtle, cool stuff over big flashy stuff, a la X-Files.

Some of them are just awfully nifty. I also got to hear about at least one fairly high-profile guest star in the remaining episodes, but I'm not allowed to say who it is yet. SciFi probably wants to dump that one out there themselves.

Anyway, it's interesting as hell to see how all that work gets drawn together into the final product. And seeing as much as I have, I'm a GREAT DEAL more confident about how the show is going to come out.

Jim

PS--OH! I also showed the crew the "Carol of the Harry." I had originally just shown it to one person, but she got all excited over it and showed it to someone else, and pretty soon the producer, director, script supervisor, the assistant directors, some of the cast, and pretty much everyone else who was in the room at the time were crowded around my laptop watching it. Everyone was really impressed that there was already a fan video and the frickin' SHOW hadn't even come out yet. Quoth one producer, watching the video, "Good lord. I'd hire this person." A director, watching it, went "Damn, this gets ME pumped about the show. (Look around.) Hungh. Maybe I'd better go get people to make it, huh."

You know, as a writer, I have got to disagree with this quote in the strongest possible terms. I *cringe* when I see aspiring writers quoting that one to each other. A character trapped in a tree is just some poor schmuck who can't really proactively do ANYTHING. All he can do is sit in the stupid tree and react, which is a HORRIBLE way to go about setting up a story, especially for beginning writers. Things get worse and worse, but it's not like it's his choices or actions making it happen. Things are just showing up. You're just reading about more bad things happening, and watching the character squirm.

Don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place for that in stories, but it's not how you plan your fricking foundations. Characters have to be a lot more active than that. I'm a firm believer in giving my protagonists their worst problems as a result of the fallout from their own actions.

They sometimes do. See what happened to all the vampires around Simon when they assaulted his compound immediately prior to the onstage events in Summer Knight.

However, while taking your killer down with you might be the most immediately gratifying thing to do with a death curse (assuming that they haven't up and prepared to defend against that kind of magical retaliation, which only a real moron *wouldn't* do if they knew they were off to murder a wizard), it might not be the SMARTEST thing you could do with it. Still, magic in the Dresden universe is only as formidable as a wizard's imagination can make it.

I mean, Maggie's death curse on Raith did /more/ than render him virtually powerless. It freaking crippled the entire White Court by rendering its head executive suddenly unwilling to get aggressive. It took that same executive's focus and warped it from an outwardly-oriented expansionist agenda (What, did you really think Raith just bumped into Maggie at a /bar/ somewhere?) to one of frantic power-defense, paranoia, and infighting. Had she merely killed Raith, another vampire much like him would simply have stepped into his shoes. Instead, her curse sandbagged the entire White Court for two or three /decades/.

It isn't until the events of White Night that the White Court really begins to . . .

. . .but perhaps I've said too much.

Anyway, Maggie's curse, of course, also made Raith suffer. Horribly. It made him live in a constant state of drug-withdrawal-level hunger, and fear, and eventually reduced him to outright slavery to someone with centuries of comeuppance to dish out. But that was just icing on the cake.
Jim

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He's a part-time consultant for the police department dealing with supernatural mayhem in a large city in the Midwest. The bad guys who don't want to kill him dead dead dead want to sign him up for their team. He spends as much time at odds with the authorities he's trying to help as he does with the various supernatural baddies.

I'd say he's got plenty of Anita in him already.

As far as the opening statement re: Anita always doing what she must to protect her people while Harry spent three years getting over his perceived betrayal by Ebenezar . . . where's the connection, there? That's sort of like saying . . . oh . . . "Winston Churchill was a freaking lush and a great speaker, whereas FDR's chair had wheels." All you can really say to that statement is: Um. Well. Yes.

My point being, in what way did Harry not take care of business, with regards to Ebenezar? The opening of PG shows, amply enough, that Harry kept his professional and personal life in different pockets, at least when it came to talking Council business with McCoy. In fact, even when it was happening in BR, he set it aside well enough to get through the crisis du jour.

And as far as Harry always questioning the nature of right and wrong, well, yes, he does. Which can be annoying to some people at times, but for someone with so much, ah, /executive priviledge/, shall we say, it's a FAR preferable flaw to possessing the kind of personality that never stops to consider it at all--or worse, assumes that anything they do is automatically right, and it's just a matter of finding the best justification for it.

This posits the question. Besides are reality and nevernever on the other side of the veil, is there anything else? If nevernever is the biggest place, does it encompass all that isn't our world, our reality? I was assume no because I don't think that Mordite (the stuff that the Archive brought to the duel) comes from Nevernever, but from outside everything.

Remember that everything Harry tells you is from Harry's point of view. As far as Harry knows, that's the way it is--with the clarification that yes, there is an Outside (where Outsiders originate) and it is a Very Bad Place. The mordite is, quite simply, matter from the Outside.

I'm not saying "that's all there is, there ain't no more." But as far as Harry knows at this point in the books, that's pretty close.

Not all beings of the Nevernever have a particular problem with iron. Faeries are the ones with serious iron issues. Most things from the Nevernever only develop serious iron issues when you use it to, oh, chop their HEADS off.

Jim

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Besides which, Harry WOULD far rather be sitting at home reading a good book than slogging through undertown or duking it out with screaming, slimy things from the backside of beyond. He doesn't do all this adventure/investigation stuff because he LIKES to do it. Well, some of the investigation he likes, but he enjoys finding lost wedding rings and such a lot more than going up against scary psychotic ghosts and whatnot.

Well. Not quite freely, but MORE freely, certainly. The Fallen bound in the coins are the freaking elite of Hell--everyone the big D didn't want trying to stab him in the back, basically. If they were suddenly freed it would do all kinds of horrible things to about a million balances of power, with repercussions that would last for centuries.

Which assumes that they /can/ be destroyed. I mean, don't think that in 2,000 years, no one has ever TRIED it. And there are still thirty of them kicking around.

Which isn't necessarily to say that it's impossible. But it sure as Hell wouldn't be easy. And given that, while in the coins, they ARE effectively frozen in carbonite without a human agent to assist them, containment certainly seems to be a prudent course.

Ah, but is it a process of pressure and change, or is it a process of polish and refinement? One could argue that the events that "changed" you in actuality only revealed a truer facet of your soul than had previously been perceiveable--that those events only changed you inasmuch as a rough diamond is changed by a master jeweler's tools. The diamond doesn't become an emerald--it just becomes a more beautiful and quinessential diamond.

(Just Devil's Advocating here, for the most part, and throwing that thought out.)

In any case, it may just be possible for a person to change enough for a soulgaze to reveal something else--but it would have to be an utterly incredible kind of change. Something along the lines of the billionaire executive who, after a near-death experience, gives all his worldly goods to charity, leaves home in his pajamas, and takes up a life of underwater basket-weaving and meditation. And even that seems a little mild to me, thinking of it.

Anyway, it'd take a truly epic change of heart and mind--to the point where you would practically *be* a whole different person, and not just a person who happens to be you with a lot more life experience to inform his outlook.

(And, in fact, there's all sorts of theories about people who this happens to after a near-death experience, regarding "walk-in" souls who come and inhabit a person near death, changing them and becoming a kind of inner Yoda to the "native" soul.)

All of the above, of course, is more or less a discussion of angels dancing on the heads of pins, but it's fun.

Jim

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What it shows you is /true/. But it isn't necessarily /all/.

For instance, a 'gaze could show you that a man was self-disciplined, sober, highly organized, dedicated to his principles, and that he loved dogs, and all of that would be /true/. But it /doesn't/ tell you /everything/ about Adolf Hitler.

Granted, a soulgaze of Hitler would probably have given off a big vibe of either "crazy" or "ruthless" too. They tend to give you a pretty good core sample of the individual in question. However, every wizard gets things a little bit differently than any other, in terms of how the soulgaze is perceived. Not every wizard sees things in symbols and allegory, the way Harry does. There's a whole spectrum of different "filters," I suppose, of how the basic natures of others are perceived.

As for misinterpreting what they perceive, or putting their own preconceptions on their interpretations? Please. EVERYONE does that, wizard or not. It's part of being human.

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1) Some have reported you saying that we have already been given enough evidence to determine Harry's age. One point of contention is the real-life timeline of David Copperfield, who only adopted that stage name in 1974 and gained national recognition in 1977. Did you have these dates in mind when you named Harry, and if so, does this give us an upper limit on Harry's age? Is the smallpox vaccination scar also meant to be a clue?

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Some, kind of, and yes. Harry's dad was acquainted with DC from the SAM when both were at a similar point in their careers--just getting going. Malcolm was a bit older and more experienced, but didn't have the same kind of raw talent and had not had any major success or anything. Malcolm had an enormous amount of admiration for the young performer (and may or may not have contributed the notion for his stage name).

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2) How long was Harry in Chicago before opening his detective business, and how long did he work with Nick at Fallen Angel? (Also, can we get a last name for Nick?)

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Harry was in Chicago for most of two years before he started working with Nick. He spent three years at Ragged Angel. Nick's full name is Nicholas Christian, and he was the protagonist of three or four short stories I wrote when I was even more ignorant about writing and storytelling--and was in fact my "original" prototype for Harry Dresden. No wizard stuff or anything, just sluething and savvy, a little karate and a gun.

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3) How long was Harry with Ebenezar? Was there much intervening time between when he left Ebenezar and when he moved to Chicago? (Yeah, so #2 and #3 together are tantamount to asking "How old is Harry in Storm Front?" Was it that obvious? )

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Harry was with Ebenezar for nearly three years, from sometime not too long after his 16th birthday until his 19th or so. He roamed around for a while before winding up in Chicago, but it wasn't Children of Israel In The Desert roaming or anything. Call it somewhere between nine and twenty months.

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4) Did you happen to have any point in time in mind for "Vignette," the short story in which Harry and Bob discuss his yellow pages ad?

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Not particularly.

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5) Care to pin down specific years for the actual books so we don't have to rely on my ridiculous BSF/ASF system? *puppy dog eyes*

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See above answer.

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6) Sorry, after the revelations at Dragon*Con, I had to add a sixth. You spoke of the age difference between Molly and Daniel as being part of the reason Molly will be the only magical Carpenter kid. However, Molly is 17 in Proven Guilty, whereas Daniel is about 15 or 16, "maybe old enough to take a driver's test." There's not much of an age difference at all. Should I get a life?

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Always! But what's critical to this particular equation is the fact that Charity was consciously and deliberately neglecting her talent--which hadn't been all THAT hot to begin with. She went through the time she got engaged to Michael, all the way through Molly's term, all the intervening time, etc, before she got to Daniel. It had been more than two, maybe three years since she'd done anything with her magic by the time Daniel was conceived.

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About how old is Alicia Carpenter in Proven Guilty? We're given approximate ages for all the kids but her.

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Uh. Hsm. My notes are buried under about six weeks of "I'll get to it in a bit" work that's been accumulating (of which answering questions here is some!). I'll try to find it. But the Carpenter kids' births are all pretty much within six months of being annual occurances.

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What is Richard's (Murph's second husband's) last name?

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Boughton.

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Care to give us approximate ages for Luccio and Morgan?

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Morgan was born fairly late in the 19th century, and fought for Britain in the Great War. Luccio can barely remember the War of 1812 (which puts her in the same category with most modern American students), but it was of no interest to her at the time, growing up in southern Italy.

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And finally, I know you're extraordinarily busy, but if you happen to glance over our timeline and notice any glaring errors, please point them out!

Yes! Murphy is a fairly serious traditional aikidoka (though that isn't the only art she's studied or employs) and she's leaned quite a bit of jo technique, which largely carries over to katana technique. Her knowledge, though, is kinda academic. She isn't a kendo practitioner, and it's not as though you can just go a few quick practice rounds with swords to keep your reflexes in shape. So when it comes to large choppy-slashy blades, she's never used it in life.

Well. Except for this really extreme moment in Hawaii . . .

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It's mentioned that the Swords of the Cross have a nail from the Crucifixtion worked into them...are they visible (as in, part of the guard or blade), or are they hidden or reforged into the metal? Also, the katana has the symbol for faith engraved on the blade...do the other two have their respective namesakes engraved on them somehow? What are they? (As in, is it a symbol or word in the blade of the broadsword and calvary sabre?)

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The nails are visible--Harry does his best to convince himself that it's rust, not blood, on the nail in the hilt of Michael's sword in Grave Peril. They are worked in to the metal of the blade, at the base, just above the guard, point toward the end of the blade.

The other two swords bear one kind of marking or another, but Shiro's was very specific to him, as he had to seek out a new sword when he inherited the old Fidelacchius. His was custom work, essentially. Sanya's sword actually has an Egyptian heiroglyph for the sun on the pommel, and he could use it as a letter-seal if he was of a mind to do it. The Egyptian, who had the sword before Sanya, often did. Sanya isn't really the wax-seal-letter-writing kind.

Amoracchius, though, is completely unadorned, pure function. Though it's possible that there may have been designs on the crossguard or hilt that have worn away over time.

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Is it supposed to be a mystery at this point whether that was Mab or not on the roof of Arctis Tor? There's been much discussion as to whether or not it was or was not, and if it's supposed to be a mystery, great, but if not, did we just miss it? (This question is purely to determine whether we, the audience, are supposed to know, or if it's still a mystery.)

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I said what I wanted to say about Arctis Tor. I'm just not done telling that entire story yet. There will be more, never fear.

Bob doesn't know! Etienne the Enchanter picked it up on the cheap, back in medieval France, and skulls weren't exactly uncommon. Etienne himself probably had it for the reason that so many writers and sages had skulls hanging around--to make their office look cooler.

Etienne, though, is the one who originally laid out the enchantment on the skull to enable it to be a little home-away-from-home for Bob, and he's been passed down, wizard-to-wizard, ever since.

If so, that would imply that I was thinking about seven years ahead. I mean, I would have to be, to have written something like that back when I did Grave Peril, which was way before the books actually *sold*. It would mean that I'm doing a lot of stuff on purpose, given that, you know, Molly actually wound up /in/ the Winter Queen's fortress, with Lea (Mab's chief advisor) actually /right there/.

Hell, if I'm doing that, why not assume that I planted stuff in Storm Front that I don't intend to come out until the big old apocalyptic trilogy's finale?

That would be kinda nerdy, dontcha think?

JimNerd Royale With Cheese

PS--I'll be answering the rest of these, honestly, as I have the time.

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Bear in mind that Harry, well, RENTS. It isn't as though he owns the rights to redecorate/refit/rewire/rework the apartment.

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Especially what with how the electrical is always giving everyone in the house fits (for some reason) and there are always repairs being made, and the security system for the top three floors is always blinking in and out, and air conditioners and electric heaters and the cable TV (let's not even TALK about how that terrible experiment with switching to satellite) and everything ELSE is constantly wonky.

The last thing Mrs. Spunkelcrief wants to do is leave herself open for MORE problems by letting that weirdo in the basement have one of his troublemaking friends over to rip up the walls and ceilings (IE, the foundation of the /rest/ of the house). Not after the mess he made of replacing the door, even if he did upgrade it to a fancy security door. For the love of God, if he wasn't such a courteous young man who nearly always pays the rent on time and who was so obviously fond and attentive to the needs of his well-behaved and charming animals . . .

Wow. I'm having this epiphany of the low-grade Gehenna it must be, trying to hold things together as the super in a wizard's building.

Didn't want to form too much of a habit: the Obligatory Potion Making Scene. Since then, I've mostly kept Dresden too pressed for time to actually get them made in "on-screen" action, though they are not even remotely vanished.

Actually, in the Dresden universe, the Wild Hunt can be led by a number of beings--INCLUDING Cern, but not exclusive to him. The Erlking (who isn't Cern) is a being of Faerie who is in Mab's weight division, if not her equal. I believe he is identified as the ruler of the goblins--which should not necessarily be equated with Tolkeinesque/Gygaxesque goblins.

Man. The existential morality of using PIE to shape the course of reality. GOOD or EVIL? That's . . . one of those discussions I never really thought I'd listen in on.

Quote"Actually, Molly's intentions when she broke that particular law twisted her." Here's where I think you hit the nail on the head Lightsabre. It's the intentions of the caster that matter. Time Travel, Nercomancy, and Mind Control are all tools that can be used to do *bad* things. I'm fairly sure what we see in the laws of magic is a sort of wizard gun control, trying to limit the existence of these problematic classes of spells.

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But if the substance of the consequences of the act itself does not have its own inherent quality of good or evil, then how can the /intentions/ behind it determine a similar quality? "Really, I was only trying to provide a better quality of life for my family and my employees. It wasn't my intention to destroy that particular species of flower in the rain forest that cures cancer." "I was just trying to give those Injuns some blankets. It wasn't my intention to expose them to smallpox and wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent people." "I just wanted to get that book finished while working two jobs and finishing a brutal semester of grad school. It wasn't my intention to screw up the name of Bianca's personal assistant whose death had motivated her to go all power hungry to get revenge on Harry."

There's some old chestnut about good itentions serving as base level gradiant on an expressway that goes somewhere, but I can't remember the specifics right now. While I agree that the /intentions/ of the person taking action are not without significance, they carry far less weight than the /consequences/ of that action.

"I meant to shoot him in the leg and wound him, not hit the femoral artery and kill him, so I should not be considered guilty of murder," is not something that stands up in a court of law /or/ in any serious moral or ethical evaluation. You had the weapon. You knew it was potentially lethal, even if you did attempt to use it in a less than fully lethal fashion. (Or if you DIDN'T know that, you were a freaking idiot playing with people's lives, something really no less excuseable.) But you chose to employ the weapon anyway. The consequences of those actions are /yours/, your doing, regardless of how innocent your intentions may have been.

Similarly, if you meant to drill that ^@#%er through the eyes, if you had every intention of murdering him outright, but you shot him in the hand and he survived with minor injuries, again the consequences overshadow your intentions. You might have made a stupid or morally queestionable choice, but it isn't like anyone *died* or anything. He's fine (at least in the long term), you're fine, and there are fewer repercussions--regardless of your hideous intentions.

The exercise of power and the necessity to consider the fallout from your actions isn't something limited to wizards and gods. Fictional people like Harry and Molly just provide more colorful examples.

As for violating the laws of magic themselves turning you good or evil, well. There's something to be said on either side of the argument, in the strictest sense, though one side of the argument is definitely less incorrect than the other. But it's going to take me several more books to lay it out, so there's no sense in ruining the fun.

Jim

(PS--Murphy can't be Kumori, obviously. Kumori is a powerful and dangerous necromancer with the personal will to hold a knife to a wizard's throat. And more to the point, she was TALL ENOUGH to do it. If she was 5' 0" Murphy, she'd have had to be wearing freaking STILTS to hold a knife at 6' 7" Harry's throat from behind. To say nothing of the fact that Harry has touched Murphy's skin on multiple occasions and never picked up a ripple of /any/ of the aura of a practitioner, much less the utterly obvious one of a fellow heavyweight. I try to follow my own rules, guys. )

A lot of writers say that they don't read anything, or don't read a lot. It's probably a perfectly reasonable point of view from where they are standing. I'm sure that it's probably a viable viewpoint, and I know that I'm new and I don't know as much as I will a few years from now.

But that seems, to me, from my point of view, somewhat nearsighted.

I read. I read a lot. I read fantasy, sci-fi, mystery. I read thrillers, suspense, horror. I even read some romance. I read newbies. I read bestsellers. I read people I've never heard of who seem to have a good idea and I want to see what they do with it.

I read because I'm a writer, and because I want to be a better writer. I love the craft of it. I love getting lost in a book (though it happens infrequently), and I love to go back through and figure out why and how an author made me laugh or snarl or cry. I love working out how another writer has created a certain effect in a book or story, and figuring out how such a thing could blend in to my own technique--or figuring out why it totally couldn't.

I read because I want to know more about the audience. What makes sci-fi fans love their genre? Romance readers? Mystery readers? What are the common threads that bind genres together and make them stand apart from others? What are the traits that cross through multiple genres? What are the touchstones that are in the foundation of them all? What kinds of stories touch the hearts of a great many readers, and why do they do it?

I hear the phrase "lowest common denominator" a lot when I read about people objecting to reading a lot of popular stuff and trying to learn something from it. Myself, I prefer a phrase like "most primal archetype" or "most foundational psychological significance." I don't go in much for, well, the literary elitism a lot of people tend to embrace.

A word of advice to the aspiring writer: everyone who has a book in print has got something to teach you. If nothing else, they can teach you what NOT to do. But don't sneer at anyone too quickly, and don't let anyone tell you what your opinion of any writer should be. Go out and read. Ask yourself questions about how other writers get things done. Read, read, read, and find your own answers and opinions. Think about how your own style can incorporate nuances of technique and craft.

Feel free to do so! But I'm writing 20-ish case books, and a big old three book apocalyptic trilogy to cap it off, and then the story is over. I have no intention of trying to force more story out for its own sake. I've got a plan, and I wanna stick to it.

Harry tried to use the sword to defy the Leanansidhe and prevent her from collecting on a lawful debt. IE, he tried to use the sword to weasel out of a promise, to avoid the consequences of choices made of his own free will.

It did him no good whatsoever and furthermore had the effect of polluting/corrupting the sword's purpose, leaving it vulnerable to destruction. Otherwise, the Leanansidhe, Bianca, and all that supernatural ilk couldn't so much have touched it, much less damage or destroy it.

Jim

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And that's everything Jim personally posted on his site. Don't worry though, there are still the things he said at the book signings. I'll get them next.

Will we find out more about Mac?
Yes, but probably not until the final trilogy.

Will we see Ferro again?
Yes. Here is where Jim commented that he is a lazy writer, so if something gets a reasonable amount of screen time in the books, chances are it will show up again later. He wouldn’t put that much effort into something that’s not so important.

How can Harry continually go to Burger King without blowing the equipment?
Unless there’s constant exposure, technology usually fouls up if magic is being actively used or a wizard’s emotions are running high. He generally remains calm when going to BK.

Why Chicago?
Originally, TDF was set in Jim’s hometown of Kansas City. His teacher at the time told him he shouldn’t use KC because he was already treading close to LKH’s territory, and he should pick somewhere else. He looked at a globe in the room, and there were 4 US cities showing. Washington DC – nope, don’t want to write about politics. New York – covered by the Fantastic Four. Los Angeles – covered by Hollywood. Chicago it is!

Will we see Lash or Lasciel again?
Lasciel’s story is not over. And keep in mind what’s said about ‘a woman scorned.’ Also keep in mind that Lasciel is NOT Lash; Lasciel did not reabsorb the entity that Harry actually changed. (Yes, he use those words “that Harry actually changed.”)

How/when did Harry find out Lea is his godmother? Is Lea Thomas’s godmother, too?
Lea was around when Harry was in middle school, although he didn’t know who she was. She was just a lady who sometimes did nice things for him. He found out who she is after he became Justin’s apprentice. Lea is not Thomas’s godmother

The titles for the trilogy are: Hell’s Bells, Stars and Stones, and Empty Night.

What book would make the best movie?
Zombie T-rex (did you need to ask?)

Will we get any more stories from other points of view?
There will be one from Marcone (in Dark and Stormy Night) and one from Murphy (entitled Hawaii).

Why does Butters always say “I’m not a doctor” – he actually is!
It’s about the way Butters defines a doctor, as someone who works on live people; it has nothing to do with Butters’ education or qualifications.

What are the upper levels of magic?
There are none, if the person has enough juice. If someone was strong enough, they could completely rewrite reality.

What’s the title to the next book?
Changes. Yes, it’s a one word title. He’s changing his pattern because… well, there just might be some changes coming up.

Where did the martial arts info and fight scene info come from?
Some from Jim’s own experiences in martial arts, some from others’ experience, some from watching movies. Jim also relayed that he started martial arts because he was always getting picked on by bullies, for being short and smart, and not knowing when to keep his mouth shut. He also talked about a time when he was about 13 that a bully actually came at him with a knife… and Jim beat him up with a bicycle.

Is Mister a familiar or anything magical?
No, he’s just a freakin’ big cat.

Are the Carpenters based on someone specific?
No. In this genre, religious characters are almost always hypocritical or judgmental. Wanted a good role model. And of course that role model needed a family to be in danger to make things interesting. The size of the family is based on his sister’s (?) family (6 kids).

Will we ever find out what people see when they Soulgaze Harry?
Kind of. In Changes, someone who has ‘Gazed Harry will tell him about the experience.

Will we ever find out more about the Black Cats, or about Eb’s early years?
He’s considered writing a story in the Dresdenverse about the American-Indian war, when Eb and the Merlin were both young punks.

Is there an actor or character reference for Binder?
Actor from Unleashed. He said Ed Asner, but we think he meant Bob Hoskins.

Will Molly be the one who fixes Carlos’s ‘problem?’
Maybe, if they both live long enough. Plus, she ‘technically’ has the same ‘problem’ so it could be interesting.

Does Thomas have a godmother?
No. Maggie figured he was a baby shark, and would be able to protect himself.

When will Jim get back the film rights?
3 years from the Lexington signing. (April 14, 2012). But the rights were only for the content to the first 5 books. Theoretically, if someone did ask him to do a zombie T-rex movie, he probably could.

Does he like writing the short stories?
Yes. He doesn’t want to clutter up the books with stuff that isn’t central to the plot, wants to keep the novels on track (“I don’t need to describe every detail of Frodo crossing the shire.”). He doesn’t want to dump extraneous information on the reader. But some things are too good for just a ‘drive-by’ mention in the novels.

Will there be any more new material for the graphic novels?
Eventually, yes. There will probably be a short story based on a comment Harry makes in Fool Moon about going on a call because someone ‘saw something in a lake.’

Hat on the covers?
“That damn hat!” It’s just on the covers. They tried to put Harry in a hat in the graphic novels, and Jim screamed.

How does Harry know so much about movies and TV?
He goes to the drive-in. Also, there’s a TV store near Wicker Park, and he sits on a bench across the street from it and watches shows with closed captioning. Yes, Harry is often like a sad Dickens character, standing outside the window looking in. (Jim makes sad big puppy dog eyes)

How big will Toot get?
Depends on how much influence he has in the world. That’s how the sidhe gain their size and power. Mab wasn’t always as big as she is now.

What protections are there against the White Court? [Editorial note, my friend’s daughter and I put her up to this question, but she hasn’t even finished Blood Rites yet, so she left out half the question, not knowing how important it was]
True love – real true love, not just romantic love – protects only against WC vamps feeding through lust/intimacy. (He didn’t name the protections against the other WC vamps, though. A thought – we should have realized love doesn’t protect against the other forms of feeding, since Harry is taken by Vitto’s attack just before Lara gets burned trying to feed on him)

When will we learn more about Maggie?
It will be little bits at a time, like we’re learning now. But eventually we will find out that what we’ve been told so far is only accurate from a certain point of view. It will all have a different meaning once we’ve learned the whole story.

What was Malcolm’s reference to the Jabberwock about?
You could argue that it was a forewarning about Lasciel. You could also argue that it was about He Who Walks Behind. Or it could be some other huge predator coming after Harry. Or you could get Jungian about it, but then you’d have to get Freudian about it, and that just gets messy.

What is Kincaid?
We’ll find out in the future.

Are there any characters that started out as minor characters but grew into something different?
Butters was originally a one-scene character, but he’s fun to write. Same with Vince Garver. Jim found out they could both be really useful.

Will the problem with wizards and technology be resolved, since most kids growing up now are so surrounded by technology?
Nope, it will always be an issue.

What is the Gatekeeper guarding? What’s behind the gates?
[sing-song voice] I’m not gonna tell you! [/sing-song voice] Seriously, he can’t tell because it would break the Laws of Magic just to talk about it.

Will Harry ever get a Warden’s sword?
He can’t, because Luccio can’t make them anymore.

Will Thomas get one of the Swords of the Cross?
[sing-song voice] I’m not gonna tell you! [/sing-song voice] (Jim's enjoying this way too much! )

Why don’t we see Harry making potions any more?
The potions were more like a security blanket for Harry. He wanted to be doing something, but he didn’t really know what he should be doing. So he was making potions in case they might be useful. Now he actually has a clue about what he should be doing most of the time. But Harry is teaching Molly about potions. That’s how she keeps changing her hair color – that was the first potion she learned to make.

Will you ever show Butters’ polka suit again?
I kind of have to, because how can I not show something that awesome again?

Jim’s favorite recurring villain?
Marcone, when he’s being a villain. And Nicodemus, because he is pure evil.

Why did the Denarians in Small Favor seem less powerful than in Death Masks?
If a Fallen has essentially overpowered their human host, then they have limited free will (they can’t use the free will of the human); a Denarian is much more powerful if they use the human as a partner.

Difference between the Fallen and other creatures from Hell?
Fallen are like corporate – they’ve got the backing of an organization.

When will we learn more about the Black Council?
There will be a little more in the next book, but really we’re not going to know it all until the very end.

Jim’s favorite supporting character?
Marcone is really fun to write. So is Nicodemus.

Will Chauncy return and use Harry’s Name?
Chauncy probably won’t come back. He’s small potatoes in Hell – kind of like a file clerk. But information flows up, so what he learned from Harry is very useful.

Are Molly's actions of peeking into Harry's head in SmF (TC spoiler) and into Luccio in TC violations of the 3rd Law? What about Harry and Elaine's communication spell in WN, or (TC spoiler) Merlin's actions at Morgan's trial?
Molly's actions are a violation of the 3rd Law. She is entering someone's head without their consent. Harry and Elaine's communication is consensual sharing of thoughts. (He didn't really answer the last part of the question)

Will Demonreach turn out to be good or evil?
Depends on your definition of those terms. But Harry will regret every having set foot on that island. Of course, Harry regrets just about anything he’s ever done.

Sword on the cover of Turn Coat.
Same thing as the hat. Although maybe he was going to write a scene where Harry had Morgan’s sword. Sometimes he has a scene in mind at one point and then it just makes sense to write it differently.

Question: Why is Bob the way he is and will we find out why he's hated so by the Fey

Answer: Jim mentioned that Bob takes on some of the personality of his "master" so when he came to Harry. Harry was about 16 years old. Sooo that's why he's so smart alecky and into girls so much. As for the Fey comment mentioned we will find out in later books.

How/when did Thomas find out Harry is his brother?
Thomas was old enough to remember his mother, and obviously he wanted to find out everything that had happened to her. He knew there was another child, and it was only a matter of time before he found out it was Harry. There is a reason Thomas showed up when he did – he was there to help Harry from the start.

Is the athame a channel for some kind of power that was hurting Lea, therefore when Mab took it away, she was injured fighting off whatever that power is?
Do you really think I’m going to answer that? The one thing I will tell you is that Mab truly did what she thought was the best thing for Lea by encasing her in ice.

Can the skinwalker access the NeverNever and use the Ways? If so, why didn’t it?
Yes. All I'll say now is that it's important to know that ‘wardens’ wasn’t always plural. (He did add later that there are certain places it can’t cross over, like the island).

Some people think Susan is smart, strong-willed, and confident. Some people think she is arrogant, stupid, and suicidal. How were thinking of her when you were writing her?
That’s one of those things that in real life, you really can’t draw that line until after the fact, until you know the whole story. But once Susan was in the story, it would have been too easy for her to become Lois Lane, always to be the victim that needs rescuing; that’s why her story went the way it did.

What about her actions at Bianca’s party?
Susan totally got what she deserved. Having said that, you have to understand that she really didn’t know how dangerous the situation was – she knew it was dangerous, but she had no idea the scale of it.

Harry’s met all the other ladies-queens-mothers - will we ever actually meet Titania?
The thing is, Titania’s only interest is messing with Harry.

What happened to the other Alphas?
Like happens with a lot of kids after college, they graduated and went their separate ways. Some of them wrote off the whole experience as the result of taking drugs in college. One ended up super religious. One ended up institutionalized. Given Kirby’s death, Billy is going to try to track down some of the group.

Will we see Ferro again?
Yes, he’ll be back for the apocalyptic trilogy.

How old is Eb?
Eb is over 300 years old. He and Merlin have known each other for a very long time. They fought on opposite sides in the French & Indian war.

Clarification on what’s behind the titles for the final trilogy.
Hell’s Bells and Stars & Stones are Harry and Eb terms; Empty Night is used by Thomas. They are curses for a reason.

Other things Jim would like to write?
He’d really like to write Halo 4.

Also, he’d like to write a short story about Bigfoot. People in a campground sight him and go screaming in terror, and there sits Harry at the campfire.
B: You got any smokes?
H: [eating] No. How’s your family?
B: My kid got that scholarship to UCLA. He’s having laser hair removal, which I really hate; he’s getting away from his roots. The wife is happy because she’s got a double-wide now.

Where did Morgan get the apron?
He just grabbed from the kitchen in Edinburgh when he was escaping.

Some conversation about Mab and Harry -
The thing is that Mab never really figures Dresden quite right. She never gets it right when she tries to predict what he will do. But Small Favor turned out really well for her.

The first gruffs seem to be different from the later sets in terms of looks, smell, and fighting approach. Were they sent by someone different?
No, they’re part of the same family. The first are just the newer gruffs, those most recent from being Changelings. They attacked Harry simply because Mab declared that she had chosen him as her emissary.

Will we run into whoever hired the skinwalker?
They have been mentioned, but they’ve not yet been onscreen.

Was the voice in Harry’s head at the end of White Night (when he was playing guitar) a sign that Lash is still there?
Not really. But Lash’s story isn’t done.

When Thomas called Harry from the storage facility and said he couldn’t handle “them” by himself, was he referring to Binder’s minions or someone else?
He was talking about Binder’s minions.

Will you tell us more about Harry’s headaches?
Yes.

How and why did the skinwalker take Thomas?
Thomas was distracted by Binder’s minions and the skinwalker saw the opportunity. It knew that Thomas is important to Harry, but not necessarily that Thomas is Harry’s brother. The skinwalker exists in more than one dimension at a time and it has its own kind of intellectus when it comes to evil – it knows what will hurt you and scare you, even though it may not really know why. It took Thomas because he knew it would hurt and scare Harry. How it tortured Thomas wasn’t part of any direction it was given to turn Thomas back into a monster, it was done because the skinwalker knew what would hurt Thomas and torment him, more than just physically.

Can you tell us more about the runes on the cottage and the lighthouse?
They were not put there by Demonreach; they have been there a very long time. They are pre-Council. They’re a prehistoric script, actually. Harry could have figured out the script if he’d had the comic book. NOTE: I have no idea what comic book Jim was referring to, so if someone else does, please post it.

Also, people have a few things wrong about the Gatekeeper and the island. The Gatekeeper did not hurt Demonreach. Gatekeeper has been on the island a couple of times, and it’s never gone well, but he didn’t cause Demonreach’s limp. That’s the work of the glacier that carved out Lake Michigan.

How is Eb protected from black magic?
The Blackstaff is a literal black staff. He hasn’t had it when we’ve seen him, but he has it and it protects him.

Given that so many creatures of the NeverNever know stuff about Harry – his mother, that Thomas is his brother, etc. – how can it be that the Senior Council doesn’t know?
They know. No one person on the SC knows everything about Harry, but between them all they could put it together. That is a group where having information is a means of power; they each have a lot of information but they don’t necessarily know who knows what.

If the White Council is so oblivious to things going on in the mortal world, how is it that Morgan knew exactly when the nuclear test was going to be (for when he nuked the skinwalker)?
A couple of tests had happened, and those things are disruptive. They send out a giant electromagnetic pulse. So naturally, the wizards noticed it. They did some research to figure out what it was, and once they understood, they made sure to know each time it was going to happen so nobody would get freaked out. So Morgan just had to plan it, to lure the skinwalker onto the range at the right time. Then he opened up a portal to the NeverNever, and barred the door behind himself. Boom.

Senior wizards are actually fairly aware of big things going on with mortals. They knew all about what was happening in the US and Russia during the Cold War. In fact, they were the ones who realized that Russia really wasn’t a major power, and that everything they were doing was in fear of the US and in preparation for defending themselves. Wizards planted the idea for the US to bug Russia. When the US found out that Russia really was just scared of them, that’s when the peace discussions began.

***Info about the Changes spoiler***The first line of Changes… is the baby Harry’s?
Harry is certainly meant to believe it is. Susan doesn’t correct herself and say, “No, I mean ours, as in mine and Captain Bland.” She is telling Harry that it’s his child.

How are you going to wrap up everything there is to wrap up in First Lord’s Fury?
It won’t wrap up everything, only the most critical stuff – how will Alerans live with each other when they’ve got an unbalanced society? How will the Alerans live with their neighbors, when their only concern previously was whether to bury the bodies of leave them to the crows? And the Beta readers are really conflicted about Aquataine right now.

Yeah I've also seen all of this before... but it's damn nice to have it in one place. Can just come here and search the page for a phrase or something to have it right there.

Cool.

Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe than time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important how we lived. After all, Number One, we're only mortal. ~Jean-Luc Picard

Q: When you finished the book, did you do an evil cackle and rub your hands together?
A: No. It was an evil cackle and finger twiddling (fingers ‘steepled’ and tapping against each other). Anticipating the readers’ reaction makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Q: For most cliffhangers, when you read the second book, you realize that there were a lot of clues in the first book. Is that the case here?
A: First of all, I don’t think it really qualifies as a cliffhanger – it’s only a cliffhanger if you don’t know what happens. I described in detail what happened. But yes, there are all kinds of clues in Changes.

Q: What’s the first line of the next book ?
A: Living is hard, dying is easy.

Q: What is the timing of the next book? Is it the usual span, or will it take place right after Aftermath?
A: More like the usual timing – about a year after Changes.

Q: Will Thomas’s memories of Maggie ever come into play?
A: Yes, but it won’t be until much later in the series.

Q: Did you decide to write Dead Beat because you wanted to fit in a zombie dinosaur, or did you think of the zombie dinosaur while writing the book?
A: Sort of. I knew I would be doing a book about necromancers, and then one day I was watching a show about dinosaur bones, and they were talking about Sue. That’s when I knew it would go into that book.

Q: When Harry read Eb’s journal in Turn Coat, there was an implied prophesy about him (Harry) of sorts. Will that come into play later in the series.
A: Well, I’m sure Eb didn’t leave that journal sitting out on purpose thinking that someone might wander in and read it /sarcasm
And yes, it will come into play. Remember, I’m a lazy writer – I don’t write many things that aren’t important. Why would I spend the time on something unimportant?

Q: Where did you get the idea for the 3 nails in the swords?
A: I knew I needed something to oppose the coins, but didn’t want to do something that’s been used a lot, like the Ark of the Covenant. And, the nails would have Jesus’s blood on them – we all know how powerful blood is in the Dresdenverse.

Q: Will we learn more about Harry’s headaches?
A: Yes

Q: Since there haven’t really been cases in the past couple of books, and with Harry’s office gone is this the end of Harry’s role as a private investigator?
A: No, he has to work on something besides being a wizard.

Q: Is the original Merlin still alive?
A: Kind of… life… death… it’s kind of a squishy line in the Dresdenverse.

Q: Are you going to make any Dresden movies?
A: I think someone else did – have you seen the pictures from Sorcerer’s Apprentice? I mean, it’s done by Nicholas Cage, who was the executive producer of the Dresden Files TV show. Look at the pictures – it’s book Harry and TV Harry.

Seriously, there are 3 years and 2 days until the rights revert to me.

And actually, I’d be interested in doing some other stuff, like an MMORPG. But then I’d never write again.

Q: Will Harry ever charge anything besides money for his cases?
A: It’s not in the plan. On the other hand, there are some people whose money Harry would never accept.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about the black staff?
A: The staff keeps Eb from going crazy, mostly. Also, the White Council stole it from someone. And they really want it back.

Q: Will we see more of Michael?
A: Yes, but his story is pretty much covered.

Q: Why hasn’t Harry created things to replace modern conveniences?
A: First, it’s subtle magic and it’s really really hard. Enchanting something to be a water heater would be like trying to put together an old Swiss watch. Way too delicate for Harry.

Also, Harry chooses not to spend his time on that kind of thing. The maintenance for something like that would take a lot of time.

Q: Harry says several times that Molly isn’t going to be a good combat wizard, but she seems to hold her own.
A: Harry still sees her as a little kid AND she’s a girl. Those are two things that Harry has a hard time looking past. She really could be very dangerous, but not in the same way Harry is – and that’s how Harry measures combat talent: sudden and intense violence.

Q: Should Harry’s first deal with Lea been covered by Maggie’s deal?
A: Not really. One problem is that Harry dealt with Lea the way that one would deal with another human, so he really didn’t get much out of the bargain besides some confidence. Lea gave him the “magic feather” so to speak.

And, Maggie could have done a little better job on her deal with Lea, but she was kind of in a rush, so she wasn’t as detailed as she should have been.

Q: Harry seemed to be gathering every powerful ally he could – why not Elaine, or the Alphas?
A: There are only so many characters I can keep straight.

Q: What is the first line of Aftermath?
A: I can’t believe he’s really dead.

Q: What is the second line of Aftermath?
A: You can find out in a few months.

Q: What were you thinking, making Butters drop like that?
A: I wanted to make someone twitch. [evil grin]

Q: Is Cowl still out of Harry’s league, now that Harry has this additional power?
A: I don’t know. Remember that Harry was outrunning the ??? (A bat thing? I’ll re-read and edit later.)

Q: You spend a lot of time with your characters. Have they become like friends, or do you stay distanced from them so you can just say ‘I’ll drop them over here’?
A: Have you read my books? If this is the way I treat my friends, would you want to be my friend?

Q: Any news on the comic?
A: Issues 5 and 6 should be out in the next couple of months. I’ve approved the art on 7 and the script on 8, so we should be back on track.

Q: Do you have to have sex in order to have protection from the White Court?
A: No, you don’t have to. It is helpful, though.

Q: Can homosexuals be protected from the White Court?
A: Of course. Any time it is Real Love between equals, there’s the possibility of protection. A parent and child couldn’t be protected because they are not equals.

Q: Are the White Court affected by thresholds?
A: Not really, they’re too mortal. But they might be affected if they were mostly vamped out when trying to cross a threshold.

Q: Why would Harry do something as drastic as take on the mantle of Winter Knight? He’s never had to do that kind of thing before.
A: There was much more on the line this time. He was desperate.

Q: Is Elaine another candidate to wield power over Outsiders (the way Harry supposedly is)?
A: Yes. There’s a reason Justin picked the two of them.